Explorer’s Log

Roster updates, level ups, and a brief time skip coming soon to a galaxy near you. Any hero deployments at this time should be for long term low-resistance projects or a quick errand before they get back.

Welcome back Lancaster. You have 4,702 unread messages. Diadem diagnostics report 14,708 maintenance issues requiring urgent attention. Half of them are false alarms because we finished removing that plate but without the administrator we couldn’t tell the system we were doing that on purpose.

While the contract was offered to the vague sense of however we put said bounties up to Bardhe, we’re not sure if how that is going since he has been missing for awhile and whether or not he accepted or simply hasn’t found a way to do so yet remains a mystery. In either case, Valencia is still alive at the moment.

Alongside this, news from SR3 reports that the Valdir are not doing so well. Kanika and her Tarrasque alongside Agallias and his army of giants are proving to be a little too perfectly matched against them, especially without the help of their mothership that is somewhere across the galaxy.

In summary, Alnae is currently seeking refuge with the Order and is planning to move to the Garden project. Diadem is currently still under quarantine but has largely been unaffected by the war. The plagues on Zenaka are finally beginning to decrease thanks to the recent push of the medical teams. Valen’s particular illness has also been fixed in the recent revisit over combating these sicknesses. All things considered we escape from this war relatively okay since the fighting was nowhere near our home territory and the Reach is particularly difficult for the Hassani to penetrate into as infiltrators since it is a massive anarchic and selfish system. Though Cayetano is practically in ruins and Zenaka is still recovering from the losses. However the plagues are slowing down ever since we implemented more countermeasures and now that it seems Jaal’Darya is becoming more concerned with taking part in the consolidation of Sol.

Kar’Soluth as a whole has lost perhaps eighty percent of the power it held before the war, though now it appears they are officially folding into the Hassani underneath Yasrena. With Alystra Vel’Sarghess becoming one of the Hassani’s most prominent commanders for her work in all of this. Jaal’Darya is in ruins after the repeated raids on them throughout the war, though Eliza herself is still alive. They’ll see large allocations of population from the Hassani to help them rebuild due to Eliza’s general importance to Kanika’s work. It is likely the Hassani will be remaining at Thenica to finish their war with the Valdir and then move on to rebuilding the war torn system.

At this juncture its worth figuring out plans for the future. Speaking of which the Caelkians, while still slow with the beurocracy and in particular due to Diadem’s quarantine, are still hanging around. In the wake of the war the Vessians are a little more wary of being pulled into things but the ones who like the farms are still aboard Diadem. Haleh is still roaming around the Reach getting into various borderline pirate mischief.

Hrm planetary cooling while surrounded on all sides by the largest star ever found might require something a little more unconventional. Even with an external layer leaves a problem of having nowhere for the heat to actually go. The think tank reports that if you absolutely had to make this work for some reason, there has to be a place for all the energy to actually go. Even if you were to make a planet sized air conditioner, the exhaust vent has to go somewhere other than the pocket the planet is located in. Theoretically this could be done with a permanent planar gate to somewhere else so it at least had somewhere to send it, then the problem becomes sending it there. We’d be trying to move more energy per day than actually hits Thenica in a year. So we’re getting into exerlus levels of engineering, but problematically its a pandem task so even they likely can’t do it.

Essentially, the tank has these options assuming you have the time, money, or capabilities to do them:
1) Planetary shield with a planar exhaust vent. If that gate ever as a fault and turns off for about 40 minutes, everyone on that world will be dead. Also this level of engineering will cost an obscene amount of money and have a critical weakpoint if we were to ever be attacked by someone who can land a really lucky shot with a missile.
2) Establish a population entirely of fire elementals, they won’t mind. Haleh can probably handle it too but good luck convincing her to sit in one place for longer than a year.
3) Create a planar link to somewhere that alters the rules a little in our favor. This will shut off the Rim as it depends on a few properties to do this but the remaining unbound stars that survive the alteration can likely be worked with to create a planet surrounded on all sides by its star.
4) Create basically a ship, similar to Eden City, that is made to survive these conditions in their entirety but it won’t really make the world itself habitable as much as just allow us to live near said molten world and slowly keep expanding it. This is basically how the Vloz’Khress did it with that molten mining planet they have. They got the idea from Kharla.
5) Find some technology that we don’t have. We know the Blaiken and the Exerlus can play with stars, even if this kind of idea is still a bit beyond that. We asked our resident Ika and they had some designs but the problem is that Ika do not draw up plans and do math. They just ‘get a feeling from the machine spirits’ and this notably has had some drawbacks in the past.
6) Build one of these ideas to be just ‘okay it can handle it for a month or so’ and then don’t build it in the same plane. Pull an Utewa and only retreat to this plane when necessary.
7) Inverted void plate sphere. This will turn the planet in question into a pitch black frozen rock that receives no energy from the stars and needs to produce enough energy to power the void shield. Which we have no idea how to produce under those conditions.

Meetings with the Valdir broke down fast. In summary, good argument, wrong person to argue with. Kaisa popped in to offer some options. Her long grandiose rant summarized: Given that this is the war cult she practically intends to curse them to eternal war if they retreat. Either they defend their home to keep it, or they will spend the rest of their lives fighting wars until they die rather than disgrace the ‘true Valdir’ any further. Which means if they retreat from Kanika they are free to join her in the fight against the Silnians, join the Hassani and fight us, or join us and fight her. That or pick some other fight entirely, she doesn’t care. She’s just mad that they keep backing out of every fight and that people keep interfering and telling them to be peaceful despite consisting entirely of perfected combat organisms in direct affiliation to the cult of war. She would rather they join the Silnians she’s fighting against than sit there and do nothing. She would also rather see them all dead than continue being pacifists. If they try to run and not pick a new fight, she confirmed she will absolutely kill all of them on the spot. In the end they decided to make their last stand against Kanika since its the only possible ending where they get to sit around and be left alone for at least a little while. They weren’t terribly happy about it, though there isn’t much they can do if Kaisa confirms her plan to murder all of them for retreating after arguing for so long that they should be allowed to keep their home to her.

Larazja actually has some insight into this though. Kaisa is one of the most charismatic and overwhelming personalities in the Valdir. While they’re a galaxy away so it hasn’t affected the Solian Valdir or Larazja herself, the synapse has contorted based on Kaisa’s ability to constantly rally the masses alongside the fact that they have been in a never ending battle against infinitely replicating enemies for years now. One of the caveats to the synapse is even those of individual opinions start to slowly sway to that of the masses. Especially under constant stress and threat upon their life in the form of their war. Because the local Valdir have been disconnected for so long the effects of it are less prominent on them and they don’t really understand how Kaisa became such a raging lunatic. She’s been left on her own unchecked and doing her own thing across the galaxy for so long that the war cult side of the synapse has become truly a fanatic cult centered around Kaisa’s ability to create and weaponize zealotry. Eroding at the individuality and humanity of the synapse as it comes more and more like a regular silnian swarm. Albeit even more dangerous since instead of being driven by something like hunger, it is now driven to desire war and conflict itself. Actually we might have a problem, they’ve been left uncontacted and alone in this war for so long that humanity is being replaced by silnian psychology spearheaded by a psychopath. The Valdir have lost touch with their solian origins with barely any solian contact and now they are violent beyond solian comprehension. What appears to us as an instant death for the Thenican swarm, is a grueling battle for survival if they want to fight against Kaisa’s metaphorical kill switch. It’s her being willing to fight them herself essentially.

Indal’s branch of the swarm are more alien than solian at this point. Despite Indal being the leader he is notoriously simple minded at times, to the point that we’re real suspicious of that Kenin fella that is always following him around. Larazja is fairly certain that the war has had effects on the swarm as a whole that pushes it in the direction that Kaisa was already preaching. Which has created an obvious issue. If Kaisa isn’t dealt with in some way or they aren’t rehabilitated they’re going to be the next galactic threat should they win the civil war. In Larazja’s artistic expression, Lolth is back and no one was paying attention to her. Though to be noted this whole analysis has one crippling flaw. The only person who has any ability to see into this stuff is Larazja. Who has been a little…off the mark at times.

Well the assault into Jaal’Darya was bloody if nothing else. Given that one of the main Hassani forces were there, things were rough. We managed to capture some of the data needed to develop vaccines and antidotes against the currently implemented strains on Zenaka and Moncayo. Fortunately too, given that we just had unpowered memory to steal from a server room and had to just hope it was the right stuff based on a quick interrogation. Though opposition came down quickly after that. It turns out that Eliza herself has become much more dangerous with all of her genetic modifications while hiding away in her lab. Vanjin and Dunchek are both dead, Michael is currently pretending to be a member of Kar’Soluth and is semi-captured as a result, Aryn is missing two limbs, and you are now in quarantine until we figure out what you picked up while we were out there. All in all, not bad given how the losses have been throughout this campaign I suppose. Next time don’t try to fight the chimera woman in hand to hand combat if you don’t know how many limbs she actually has.

For now the base intended to become a resistance base on Thenica is laying low, while it gives them some merit to say they’re just a shopping mall still, doing anything too sketchy while the Hassani are consolidating the territory might draw a lot of very drastic attention.

As for the Aryn drone network, we can’t figure out how half her cybernetics work in the first place let alone modify them. She’s one of Daiheb’s models and her power source is an artifact of all things. So attempting to turn her into a swarm controller would be a bit difficult given that turning anyone into that would be hard enough. The Voidforged are actively working on a similar project and making very slow progress and other then that the Lucid Cult were the only other ones getting anywhere in the ballpark but still relied on large numbers of people to control individual things. The quest to outsource the crew requirement of large ships is one practically everyone is on, and I don’t think Aryn is the best starting point to jump into that research given that we already don’t understand the technology that makes her work.

We have begun the process of figuring out the Hydra coalition. Though the name is a bit inaccurate since each of the Hydra’s heads runs different matters. Fortunately it is a very widespread group and not that hard to get some people in on, we’ve already gotten a few agents peeking into some of what we can confirm are extensions of the Hydra’s network. Unfortunately it is such a spread out organizational structure that we’re not confident that any cell we infiltrate will have any idea what the other sections are doing unless we manage to get further up the ranks. It’s a work in progress.

All our base, base, base, are belong to them. In the meantime I’m setting up some trials to see about replacing some of our comrades in the aftermath of the war. Some new agents of particular import. Requests duly noted, BUT ONLY THE BEST MAY JOIN. Is it cheating if two competitors are duct taped together?

With the war winding down we’ve at least gotten a good measure of where we stand in conflicts of this scale. We’re definitely some of the heaviest hitters and our most experienced members to have a quirk of being rather difficult to put down for good. I think this is the third time Chevalier has been ripped in half. Though I have also determined this is rather unhealthy for us in line with the testing inspired by the Exerlus commentary on our cores. Chevalier is just uniquely capable of this which might have given soooome of us the wrong impression that our species as a whole could do it as smoothly as he does.

It would turn out Chevalier is just the most…self? of us. The erosion of his psyche that should be caused by moving his core from one chassis to the next is minimal for him and I think its actually because of how philosophical he is. Of all the voidforged, he is the most in tune with the idea of who and what he is and that might somehow be affecting his ability to stave off the effects of psyche erosion.

Vanessa has definitely been kind of twitchy since I rebuilt her, not sure if thats a side effect or a warning sign. Probably should have made those blades a bit easier to retract because she could take someone’s arm off if she were to twitch just right…or maybe wrong.

Either way, production on the new lines are underway and I for some reason get the feeling that statement is particularly relevant right now.

The giants that make up Agallias’ forces have arrived this month. Apparently the Phantoms saw fit to equip them with modern power armor, except using their own magic as the power source. So basically each one of them is a class four mech on steroids. With their arrival, they’ve begun the campaign on SR3, where the Valdir are. This has recalled the Tarrasque from Shetou territory, which lost six major cities, and now the hydra itself has appeared to take over Hassani operations on Thenica while its main forces push offenses on two other planets. Shetou has negotiated for a cease fire with the Hassani after the Jaal’Darya plagues began to spread across SV2, apparently its buying time for Laesaaria to negotiate terms with Sakhessa who sent a message to ask if you wanted to include yourself in this one too or if you would prefer to wrap things up on SV2. She also offered us to join the surrender negotiations with Laesaaria though can’t promise it’ll go so well given how the last one turned out.

Cazvallow sent a message to explain the current situation with the negotiations for surrender. Laesaaria is mostly just trying not to get placed in a position underneath Yasrena and this is also buying time for them to get Auni Kuu far away from here. She pointed out Auni is being sent deep into the galaxy for the time being, as the general goal is to get the now-greatest incarnum practitioner far away from all of this to buy time for them to finish learning how the whole “I absorbed all my  predecessors” thing works in the hope that all House Song’s ancient knowledge might be useful. Though she admits the outlook is bleak, since Kanika has already proven to outmatch the previous clan’s leader and is only getting stronger as the war goes on. With Kanika harvesting essentia from these battles and gaining more experience in using her newfound body’s zankist training, they’re running out of ideas of what to do about her. Especially while she is surrounded by a legion of similarly dangerous creatures. Despite the pamphlet ilex released some while ago, the various empires had been largely unprepared for how much combat training the military leaders of the Phantoms had gained. Sol hasn’t really seen monsters who know tactics and are equipped with the same level of technology as their humanoid opponents. Without Song Yi, Shetou doesn’t have much of a “die fighting” voice in their politics and with the Jaal’Darya plagues beginning to spread through Shetou the leadership seemed to have marked the whole war as unwinnable. At this point they’re just trying to save as many lives as they can. Their society is quite adept at operating from within another one, which is why a lot of independent startup colonies often wound up absorbed into Shetou. Until the schism and the Phantoms stealing the strategy from them on the frontier. As such the best possible chance they have to ever deal with Kanika on their end would be to play a bit more patiently. Though Cazvallow herself will be remaining, four of the ships that they lost in the war had only the bare minimum of crew despite being notable ships. The intended crews are a few of her daughters and their forces. She has requested we take them to Diadem on our fleet as to hide the fact that they are still alive for as long as possible and to buy them time to invest in the Reach to rebuild while under less direct scrutiny from the Hassani.

So if we opt to continue the battle in Sol it is likely that Shetou will no longer be able to assist us. The Valdir are in a position where they probably have to fight to the end since Kaisa will probably not be particularly kind on them if they surrender, but without Shetou’s naval and logistical help they aren’t likely to do so well.

To clarify, when you say the enclosed pockets of the Rim, do you mean the areas of space surrounded by so much star stuff that night no longer exists and the surface of anything resembling a planet would be probably molten, or the orbiting ‘chunks of stuff’ that just travel along the outside of the rim?

The Think Tank has been established though a large part of exploiting the Rim is still exploring it, saying that its ‘really big’ will summon an astronomer from the corner of the room to try and explain how big it is for three hours. While a few candidates have come up they would still involve some heavy terraforming processes and that might just be an issue with the youth of the galaxy. Though if nothing else, Valjala definitely has a lot of energy to work with if any life forms can make use of it. The collective study of the new plane hasn’t found much promising in terms of anything being alive but we’ve only been able to search around a a hundred planets out of millions, and that’s just with long range observation let alone actually setting foot anywhere. The tank is also concerned as to how much in the galaxy they can’t properly detect due to the limitations of light speed compared to the age of the plane. It’s part of why it took them weirdly long to notice the giant ring of eternal fire in the middle of the whole galaxy.

Exploration difficulties aside, they did come up with some initial ideas on how they might exploit the energy of the rim. Obviously can’t go wrong with solar panels, though we do lack the technology to collect it with the efficiency the exerlus have. if we put the panels too close they just melt. Not really sure what the exerlus do for cooling systems with their giant ass sphere. Other ideas they came up with include utilizing biological methods of exploitation. Particularly Eden and Larazja. Both of whom can biologically mutate themselves to make use of being blasted by sunlight, Larazja in particular can also adapt the Nevun biology to withstand dramatically increased temperatures. If one of the valdir adapted to just survive in the vacuum of space, it’s fair to say it is likely that Larazja can handle extremely hot worlds. Which means more energy, and the rate that the synapse can grow when provided with that energy could have some potential. Another idea was to get some elementals involved somehow, they aren’t really sure what that would entail but its an idea. The rim itself doesn’t have an arcane star that is easy to exploit so unfortunately the arcurans and zenakans aren’t as useful in this particular circumstance. They’ve asked the druidic chapter of the order to look into if they could make a plant that really really loved sunlight. So that’s still underway.

Yoshai is still off looking for the Revenants, same for Irae with the somewhat mythical metal archon.

Kaylen is difficult to contact, it is likely she is still getting into trouble across Thenica trying to be a thorn in the Hassani’s side. Though unfortunately for her, despite her power as a zankist grandmaster with an artifact, so seems to be having next to no impact on the war with such meager forces. I’ll keep an eye out to see if she pops up again soon to see if she wants to come along.

Ankathi is of a mind that continuing to work on Valencia is still a good idea. We already know Yasrena is on the pantheon and it is highly likely that if it is somehow a secret from the Hassani then it won’t be for long. However, that is fairly sensitive information that we can’t even tell the demon king about right now. As a result, Valencia being in a much more open alliance with the Phantoms makes for a real easy scapegoat for anything Yasrena might be up to and atop of which would only further endear the Demon King to the pantheon as it would mean the pantheon has someone perhaps openly tied to the Hassani, who are about to be the most powerful government of Sol. With Shetou and Alnae gone, even if the demon kingdom and the remaining handful of others teamed up its rather clear that Kanika, the person who specializes in killing or making immortals, is not someone the demon lords, archons, abyssal lords, or even gods are going to be in a terrible hurry to pick a fight with.

Though while on the topic she is also interested in the Utewa, since they have the ability to pandem rift a whole planet someone on that planet has to be good enough to qualify and diversifying her pantheon does appeal to her. Keeping of a mind that she is still fairly confident that anyone on the pantheon has to obey her regardless of their personalities, so sometimes she just takes shots in the dark and assumes it can’t go that poorly for her. Another option would include more archons, she finds them quite impressive considering they can unmake the laws of physics as we know them at any given time. She wouldn’t mind collecting a jesai either, especially Decaelys. She has mentioned that uplifting the mortals is clearly more effort than its worth as this whole thing requires a very strong mastery of both pandem magic and the mana well to survive the wilds even with assistance. So her attention is shifting towards candidates who are already powerful enough to meet the latter condition given how the Jaerda project is going. She also inquired as to Eden’s mana capabilities while she was at it. Worth keeping in mind she has completely lost track of what any of this has to do with the demon king and is just thinking of people that would make for interesting additions to the group. I have to wonder if this would all be easier or harder if we just got Ankathi to go talk to the demon king herself.

Though while we’re on the topic, Selah was recently recalled to the First Temple in the celestial realm by Ankathi so she’s away for a little bit at the moment.

While we’re at it, I checked in with Haziel about the silnian civil war. With SR3 being invaded it seems peculiar that they’re being left to fend for themselves. Also to tell her we would offer Indal a portal all the way back to Thenica for as many people as he could cram into it if they wanted. I tried to get her to offer favors to him if he took the deal as he might be the only thing that can stop Kanika. Despite her not finding me very funny, she pointed out the silnian civil war is basically ripping apart that corner of the galaxy. Planets like Eden are smacking into each other and trying to throw each other into nearby stars for example. The Valdir extension that lives on SR3 are those who didn’t want to go to that war and as such they’re sort of on their own as they see the Thenican war as a much smaller conflict. She was unable to convince them of the magnitude of the problem of letting Kanika win this for a large variety of reasons but it can be summed up as “if they wanted to, the valdir could eat the entire thenican system overnight. This isn’t really the most pressing issue.” Though given that Indal has been removed from solian matters for some years now, it is likely that the valdir aren’t really aware, or easy to convince of, the ongoing threat that Selona has caused by trapping all of the elder civilizations in various internal conflicts that left the rest of the galaxy to run amuck without their presence.

We’ve sent the gang out to Jaal’Darya territory, though they’re still on the way and scouting out the place to see what is going on and where they might be able to infiltrate to find any information on the plagues that could hopefully lead to progress on that front. So far at least the rate of it’s spread has been slowed but we’re still far from finding a way to put a stop to it. However with Shetou entering into a cease fire and preparing to surrender, this will make it more difficult to find opportunities since it is acting as the major base of the Hassani forces on SV2.

In other news, that strange facility we were keeping an eye on in the northern part of the galaxy has been attacked recently by Nelta. Which turned out to be the ship that had passed through the northern borders and caused them to be shut down to the Iron Cradle when they were trying to pass by. So that all came full circle while we were busy over here. Apparently, Lancaster, Jiyan, and Sarrai were all located there. So good news, we figured out where they were.

We’ve managed to finish repairing the major issues on the Iron Cradle, though Koda wants us back out on the front lines at SV2 so we’ll see how long that lasts. We’re still missing a chunk or two that will take even longer to replace. Though right now we’re all just waiting to see if the FVS is going to continue fighting even with Shetou pulling out.

Still working on new designs but with us being sent in and out and into an active war, not that much time for R&D.

The war at SV2 has started to get into action across the planet, with the vampire clans and the Hassani attacking major military installations and cities right away. SV2 is made up of cave networks, canyons, and a whole lot of rubble from the Nelta invasion that wiped out surface cities. With so many of our forces moving there, Sakhessa has also moved on to SV2 though Azarov has remained back at Thenica. The fighting is just as aggressive as before and the De’Rex family fleet is in orbit currently fighting the major space station of Shetou and anything else in their way.

The Hassani army has also shown up to Thenica, they are primarily serving as clean up teams and setting up bases and other fortified position alongside the hydra’s forces. It would appear that they are more rank and file types who are just here to fulfill the plot of the invasion and do their mandatory military service compared to Sakhessa’s legion that is much more combat ready. So basically the regular grunts, despite having some big monsters on hand. Though they are securing Sarghess territory and starting to reinforce other positions across the planet with turrets and shields for the Hassani to utilize to maintain the invasion or formally take over. Also a coalition of independent ships have shown up that we know to be under the management of the hydra.

The Jaal’Darya territory has returned to our dimension or however that works, everyone who went in is dead and Sarghess is still standing albeit they have lost half of their forces in the fighting. Apparently the isolation sphere from Decaelys served to allow Eliza to use chemical and biological weapons on the forces without them having access to any medical support or labs to help deal with her weapons. After their reappearance one of the Hassani armies moved in to help add additional fortifications and secure the city as an operating base for the assault on the rest of SV2 and they have been placed under the command of Alystra. The Jaal’Darya territory is however currently without several important utilities since the spell Decaelys use appears to have severed power lines and plumbing if it went outside of the sphere.

The vessians have left Beldobaan to help us at SV2 though they have some growing concerns on whether or not you plan to actually win this war they’re being dragged into. Most of the fighting is at New Kaifen, which is severely understaffed with House Song still being at Thenica who would normally be the city’s defense force.

The fighting at SV2 has seen less significant losses for us then at Beldobaan since the rest of the Shetou forces are taking the worst of it, though in total it is definitely seeing more overall casualties than Beldobaan. Azarov has made it to SV2 and our tank lines and broke through our tank lines defending New Kaifen. Sakhessa in particular has become a problem for several cities as the rot and Jaal’Darya plagues are running through Shetou’s population as well. The orbital battle, with Sharen effectively depleted, is currently in the favor of the De’Rex fleet.

The assault on the Tarrasque has been experiencing delays, Laesaaria still doesn’t want to send Auni after it just yet and Renjala is still in negotiations with Ankathi to borrow Kharla. Eleazor is also pretending to be sick and laying in bed trying to get out of it and Renjala sent Vasia to SR3 to check in on the Valdir. Though on that news front, the Tarrasque is wandering from one military installation to the next. It has been attacking places with anti orbital weapons, and soon it is likely that the defensive advantage of Shetou territory will be lost and then Sakhessa’s fleet will have a much easier time pushing into our retreated fleets.

As for the plagues afflicting us, every time we make progress two variations or some entirely new string appears. Though with advanced medical care we’ve been able to stabilize Valen for now. Though that level of attention can’t really be given to the millions being afflicted by a huge variety of different such problems. The rate of spreading has slowed significantly though thanks to not only quarantine but so many people already being infected that they can’t go anywhere to infect others. Also the number of deaths have reached a point that even plague deniers are scared of it now. Zenaka is pushing to continue the attack on Jaal’Darya since they are feeling the worst of it at the moment.

Diadem farms are doing fine in the bubbles Renjala had built to keep the space bugs from eating them.

Many of the Vessians on Diadem have left back into the Reach to get away from all this plague nonsense and the current measures that Laura has been taking to keep Diadem secure. A few remain out of curiosity, and because of the food.

The Caelkians are still sorting through beurocracy and also keeping a close eye on the qurantine at Diadem and seem to be intentionally waiting on moving forward with anything until they see how this shakes out. Currently there isn’t much they can actively do at Diadem anyways since Laura’s forces are gunning people down in the street if they break quarantine which has brought a lot of civilian matters to a halt. The Caelkians are doing fine on food as their planet is still fine and has never come under the attention of the galactic wars, since they’re new to the neighborhood.

Irae and Jaerda have taken off into the elemental plane to seek out the elusive metal archon. A team of scientists are also investigating the rim in Valjala. Apparently, it is an untold mass of trillions of unbound stars forming a singular massive unbound star. It runs a ring through the middle of the entire galaxy. The constant reaction of the stars is also spinning, which is really only of interest to the math nerds. In short if you fly through it, evaporated. There are tunnels of space where it would be possible to pass through but they are always closing and opening while the stars swirl about. It’s basically a ring of really hot always moving star stuff that encircles the whole galaxy albeit with a few empty pockets here and there. In terms of cosmic phenomena, neat. The scholars think the amount of energy this ring contains might have some peculiar effects on the properties of the galaxy within Valjala. Further exploration reveals that this has created a strange “system”, there are planetary bodies not quite orbiting the rim but instead flowing along it around the entire galaxy. Which I suppose fits a certain theme. They don’t need to be entire systems orbiting a star if they just float along the momentum of the rim which provides way too much sunlight as it is. So basically there is a field of asteroids, planets, and other such things floating along a cosmic river of fire as they circle the galaxy. The math nerds spend all day trying to explain just how much mass and energy is in this rim, they keep pointing out it is an incomprehensible series of numbers so I stopped listening before I come down with a case of the sahads. Try asking them about solar panels and they’ll go on for two hours about it.

The search for an arcane star hits a related topic. The rim has every kind of star inside its swirling infinite mass of fusion, though its not terribly exploitable since nothing stays in place very well in there. We did find a couple of arcane stars with some effort though none of them have planets suited to life just yet without intense terraforming.

Also you are correct, Revenants will not accept that deal. We actually couldn’t even get the message to them because they won’t accept the attempt to communicate with them either. Auni remains at an undisclosed location, Laesaaria pointed out that putting both you and Auni in the same place is likely to draw more attention from Kanika than you might want to deal with. Even with the merits of the garden project, if it became Kanika’s top priority so early into the project’s infancy it probably wouldn’t do much to stop her.

Eerihild has been deployed to New Jamalia and Yoshai has started looking for the Black Library though after three weeks of looking for any sort of lead he points out this might be a bit of a wild mimic chase. The Revenants stole it from Yasrena and most of Yoshai’s powers are associated with Yasrena, the person they would most intentionally be hiding it from. Though he’s still not sure how they managed to steal an archive so massive and make it disappear and is trying to wrap his head around that one.

Vasia has taken off to SR3 and no one knows what she’s doing over there. Though the assault has not yet begun there. Kanika is still wrapping up on Thenica first it seems.

Also while it hasn’t come up in awhile, the attempts to build a full city runs us out of budget.

Worth noting we already know how to print the admin cards, but it requires control of four distinct sections of the ringworld that are all across from each other rather than right next to one another. Also Aryn points out if she uses the Chaudret it could have much more significant ramifications depending how interconnected the systems of the ringworld actually are. Given that she can never accurately predict what the Chaudret will do, odds are she just destroys the life support system on accident and in order to repair anything Chaudret does we’d need access to the control of every system. Though it works great on robot monsters.

Also even if listening is your whole job I’m not sure I’d describe you as a therapist. Also no one likes therapy from a drow. Michael seems fine anyways, if just a bit callous lately.

Also at this point I should say that Enphidia’s turret defenses are getting a little over the top and if the place is going to be attacked I have a feeling they’re going to find a way to circumvent the turrets rather than go through them. That and we’re running out of space to fit them.

Allison’s friends on Thenica are either dead or she has no way to contact them, especially from across the galaxy with the aethernet not quite spanning that far. As for ideas about dealing with the Tarrasque she laughed. This is definitely more of Renjala’s realm, that thing is invulnerable and shoots the equivalent  of ten nukes a second. Her shotgun isn’t exactly going to help much.

As for the Tungsten Teeth contracts, they have been mysteriously hard to find with many of them turning it down. It is likely that somewhere in the Reach, someone knows what is going on at Thenica and has warned them that accepting the job is just a suicide mission.

Some intel updates, Alystra Vel’Sarghess received command over one of the Hassani armies and this has some implications even if they aren’t being stated outright. With Alystra gaining command she has also received supplies and armaments from Sakhessa, making the Kar’Soluth relationship to the Hassani much more direct. While this doesn’t have many strategic implications just yet, it implies that Alystra has received the faith and goodwill of the Hassani upper command such as Sakhessa and Kanika. Which might be a growing trend for the Kar’Soluth as they become politically folded into the Hassani properly in the wake of this conquest. Not very useful intel strategically speaking in the middle of a war, but perhaps worth noting that the process of merging Kar’Soluth into the Hassani has likely begun and Alystra will possibly be a problem for awhile to come.

Now that we have some time off, we’ve been continuing to repair the cradle, which is a bit of an experience as it is the docks most other ships go to get repaired. So that’s taking some effort.

I’ve managed to make some improvements to Vanessa’s chassis now that I have the opportunity to make her holo projector version of herself less uncanny by making it more intimidating and adding more blades.

Hrmm a single cored ship would be fairly unique, barring the Cradle itself. Though it is still a definitely difficult thing. I’ll work on it and see where we can get with the idea.

News from the front, more forces are arriving just as ours are. Despite them having access to Renjala’s rift now, it would appear they are not as adept at using it nor do they have an organization dedicated to transportation for all their disparate forces. This month saw the arrival of Sakhessa’s fleet in orbit, Asmodan’s demon legion in Beldobaan, and Kanika’s private collection of maybe brainwashed humanoids. A collection that has been significantly reduced ever since we shoved her previous ship into the Astral Wilds.

We also see the arrival of Kaylen with an army we don’t entirely know how she got though it appears a good portion of them are from the Hasao Tei and the exiled celestials who survived but fled the war with Ankathi. The Revenants also got around to showing up, once again revealing they had far more members than we realized. Apparently they had been hiding the fact that they are not exclusively an organization of masked women with katana’s as there is actually some variety among them when they group together to form a cohesive force. Lot of katanas still.

Along with this, the vampire clans have arrived at SV2 to attack Shetou’s pseudo-capital while both House Sharen and Song are away at Thenica. There is a whole other battlefield taking place over there now.

Projections indicate that more forces are still on their way.

The Arrival of Sakhessa’s fleet has skewed projections out of our favor. With every fleet currently damaged and barely still afloat, her fleet is nearly uncontested for orbital superiority.

The “Ham Sandwich” operation managed to successfully extract what remains of our forces and allies. Largely due to Sakhessa allowing the withdrawal though instructed the knights to be quick about it before Asmodan caught up and complained to her about it. The commander assesssed any attempt to continue the attack was pointless now that Asmodan’s demon legion had shown up and Kanika’s forces have arrived in the nearby Sarghess Territory, putting them in position to catch our forces from behind if they moved over. Asmodan’s legion is now moving west to Vloz’Khress territory where the 5th are currently still destroying civilian targets and infrastructure.

The Tarrasque has moved and is currently attacking Shetou territories elsewhere on the planet and seems to be avoiding any fighting where Hassani’s forces are located. Currently we suspect that while they can command it, the Tarrasque isn’t great at discriminating what it attacks. This might be why Kanika was the only one fighting the Valdir alongside it and only just now brought her own troops to Thenica after separating from it. That and the Valdir ability to eat any living people it defeats. We have discovered a small team of Revenants are following it, likely trying to figure out what can possibly be done against the thing.

The orbital battle sees the successful destruction of The Areti with the combined assault and focus on it albeit at great cost. Though the Midnight was unsuccessful in its attempt to crash into Agallias. While it made it to the surface of Thenica, he managed to dodge the attempt and the ship was disabled before it could consider swinging back around on him. The RABE ship retreated into Sakhessa’s fleet when the destroyers went after it and the pursuing ships were destroyed by said fleet or the RABE itself.

Moving Eden into Valjala is somehow the easiest part of this plan. Moving the arcane star is an engineering feat and a half though and that is not our specialty. Eden just needs a big enough rift and she’ll walk in on her own, though Moncayo’s star is over a million times more massive. Even if Decaelys -the jesai archbishop who might  be some eldritch elemental of time and space- could do it we certainly can’t figure out how the fuck she did that. We have similar problems with moving Enohas and Moncayo. Moncayo, or rather Cayetano, is an abyssal place and as a result likes to be really fucky with the concept according to the physicists and math guys we asked to look into it. Even if it was just the city of Moncayo, we don’t have Rahlken’s ship laying around. Taking the city is somewhat feasible but it would wind up in Valjala with no sustainable atmosphere, gravity, or ability to protect itself from the kinetic energies in your plane.

Really with the exception of Eden, who is mobile on her own and also probably the most powerful wizard we know by mana well standards, moving a planet and making rifts this large is going to take years of engineering and prep. Also a horrifying amount of money. Which we caaan do if you really want but I get the impression this is a matter of urgency. The most realistic way to accomplish these goals with all speed would be to get the Exerlus, Jesai, or Rahlken involved somehow. I also had the nerds do the math of having Eden just push things around for us, it turns out that would pretty much destroy the planet she is nudging. Between what she would do to gravity, atmospheres, and ecosystems with such a maneuver you’d be getting a ball of rock and dirt in the middle of an irreversible mass extinction. Problem two is that Eden is a powerful enough being that she can protect herself from your plane. Planets from the middle plane might be a bit too used to their own rules and just implode after a couple of years in Valjala without massive life support systems that would be the equivalent of building a ship the size of a planet. Just out of dirt.

That being said, in terms of options, we could just find another ball of rock and dirt then ask Haziel for help with habitability. There are also arcane stars within your plane and I’m not sure how much it matters where in space it is within Valjala since position is not a very constant variable anyways.

By the way, according to the observatories your plane has an estimated 1370% more unbound stars than the middle planes. Which is not counting something they think they found and have been sending scout ships out to go look at which is either the largest unbound star ever found or millions of unbound stars stuck together. They call it Renjala’s Rim, and they snickered when they said that. Irrelevant but the last eight months have been very gloomy around here and I needed something else to talk about.

Related to options, I checked in on Jaerda’s progress and this prompted some further investigation about her lack thereof. Aside from her attention issues, the big problem is she can’t handle the Astral Wilds for very long and this process requires surviving there for months. Yasrena was a quasigodlike thing already and judging by her original true form of that big leviathan thing, she had a mana well on the scale of ships. Not to mention she’s been watching over the drow for thousands of years and I’m sure the opportunity for trauma and personal growth was pretty great under those conditions. Haziel had the essentia of a primordial god along with a throne waiting for her to just take over the plane rather than build one. Ankathi is the one in a trillion who pulled this bullshit off on her own with raw stubborness and talent. To the point that we’re pretty sure if we still had access to her original human form we’d find some severe anomalies about her essentia and psyche. That and she did take over another astral cluster to act as a forward base before she made her own. In your case you just embraced the madness because you didn’t need biology to keep your consciousness intact. The team at Panemperia thinks we might need to think of some way to juice this up a bit for a regular elf. She’s too vulnerable to the wilds and just doesn’t have the mana capacity to move planes the way you did to create a new one, and the alternative of taking over an existing one is difficult as she is tied to planes that already have Haziel for a god.

All things considered, I don’t think this Jaerda business will be finished before the war is over since we need Ankathi’s expertise and help or a century of Jaerda getting strong enough through potentially dubious methods. The bigger problem with getting Ankathi’s help at the moment is that Selah just got back from the Beldobaan withdrawal and she is in no state to do anything with this for the month at least. I’ve never seen a paladin so exhausted and just staring into the distance for hours like that, even if they are somewhat known for being super stoic and stern. Half a year of constant combat in the underdark against vampires, monsters, and drow is apparently the breaking point.

Which leads into, psychological assessments! Everyone that went there is fucked up…except Eerihild. Weirdly, she is actually apparently very good at this exact scenario. She made it through the two years of total blackness inside of Diadem, even just started wandering around with a mental patient in tow, and now survived the Battle of Beldobaan. Which is just as bad if not even worse. She seems ‘not fine’ at first glance, but she doesn’t have the same war trauma everyone else does. She’s pouty because she lost to Reika, who she technically replaced. So she’s suffering from a bad case of imposter syndrome, not ‘I fought vampires in the underdark for half a year nonstop’ syndrome. So technically her mental problems are about five percent of what everyone else is handling even if she’s sulking in a corner somewhere.

Yasrena, or The Shadow, said it was obvious but she felt she should tell us just in case – but the war on Thenica is going to see more Phantoms appear for the coming months. Next month she knows that the Hassani proper army will be arriving along with the Hydra’s fleet. The month after that Agallias’ army will be warped in along with Decaelys’ followers. After that the Selona Syndicate. Also because they look so similar to solians no one has noticed that Mother (the Blaiken empress clone mom thingy) is there with Kanika. The white haired teenage looking girl that people keep mistaking for one of Kanika’s brainwashed champions that has enough psionic ability to flatten an aboleth. Jarias is also asking for a ride over because he wants to eat the fleet salvage. So the last two months of reinforcements are going to be a pattern as the war expands to SV2 and SR3. The major worlds of Shetou and the Valdir respectively.

She expects the assault on Shetou to be handled largely by Kanika’s forces and the vampires, while Kanika herself, the Tarrasque, and Agallias will be headed to fight Valdir. Also Yasrena said that some of the spookiest Phantoms are coming back as well. The list is too long and I don’t think anyone cares. Though some of these monsters that we haven’t seen in centuries that seemed kind of like a joke of a bygone age for adventure games sound a lot less funny all of a sudden. Like a mimic that isn’t a treasure chest, but instead impersonates starships and houses. Essentially while the titanic threats like Agallias and the Tarrasque are obviously dangerous, we can expect people in this war to have some issues from encountering things like mimics, the bagmen, oblexes, false hydras, and all that shit we thought was definitely fucking extinct so we didn’t worry about living in a world were things had learned to specifically prey on humanoids. This war will be the second time in solian history that these things aren’t killing for food but for…well war. Kaylen sort of glossed over that part of the guild’s history. The part where the soldiers never mentally recovered and either wound up with crippling paranoia, insanity, or would commit suicide. The closing years of the purge saw the methodical elimination of such threats with tech and industry. The earlier years were guys with shotguns getting eaten by things that could come from any angle. Not to mention the actual war against Kanika in the first place that left generational scars on people, such as Kaylen who wasn’t even there for any of it.

All this is to say, those months in Beldobaan were a lot worse than we might be able to understand from the comfort of our space base ruled over by a lich who has seen the Astral Wilds and lived. While Selah is already a close friend of madness and Eerihild is technically one of these monsters so didn’t even notice, the rest of the knights who came back are not okay. We lost a hundred knights and three hundred squires to resignation after they got back, and we already found sixteen of them dead in their homes. If we weren’t in the process of retreating I’d point out that New Age are some of the only people with the mental fortitude to handle this stuff and we should consider giving them bigger guns or something.

Federation news, since Koda is busy with the war and Lancaster is still missing, it is noted that Haleh has no plans to retreat into Valjala. If we pack up and leave Diadem she said she’ll probably just go back into the reach or stay there and see what all these exerlus bots are up to. The Ika also have a lot of questions about why everyone is leaving given that Diadem is their ancestral home in a way and they aren’t too keen to just abandon it. Laura is also fairly confident that if we were worried about them assaulting Diadem, Valjala won’t be that much safer. At least here people are encased in an impossibly massive amount of armor, even with your abilities she feels like Valjala is very exposed by comparison. If just one Phantom turns out to know how to deal with gods in their planes, like the Era of Rising did with medeival technology, the whole thing falls apart. Also Zenakans are curious where this all leaves them since evacuating a population that massive is somewhat impossible and they’re still dying of plagues.

Oh also we got the uninfected Arcurans and such out as requested.

With the pirates cleared out we’ve been able to send recovery teams into the ship section, they were actually trying to see if it was possible to bring its turrets back online since it was once a self sufficient station that we strapped onto the rest of the cradle. Answer was nope that thing is messed up. Though while they were there they were able to find and recover the core of Vanessa along with several others from the troops who were aboard. They’ll need new bodies constructed and right now we’re exploding so project for later, but thought you would want to know.

The cradle withdrew after the destruction of the Areti to Renjala’s garden project and is in need of serious repairs as evidenced by the entire missing sixth of the ship we ejected for contamination reasons. I suppose what we have learned from this is that the cradle tends to draw a lot of attention.

We’ve begun construction of a new station here in Valjala as requested, one that won’t go anywhere so we have a place to come back to.

As an intel report, while we’re seeing half a dozen new forces showing up to Thenica left and right I think they’re getting their numbers from Selona. This war is something he should be invested in as he was part of the original plot to start it though he is conspicuously absent despite being a major member of the Phantoms and just Sol in general. We have reason to suspect a great many of the troops assembling are from him in some capacity though he is deliberately keeping his involvement hidden. Though we noticed that a lot of individuals among the Hydra’s forces have Selona’s tech and have confirmed the presence of at least three of his androids running around in there. With Nila being here it isn’t that surprising.

Also as the Phantoms proper are showing up, the fighting has been getting weird. I have reports of platoons disappearing in the night along with all of their tents. People turning around and finding their comrades just missing entirely, and it is a weird trend that the disappearing comrades are always the support crew. Our agents are having to get even more cautious as the environments themselves are turning against people with all these weird ass monsters showing up.

Trying to evacuate Kennae from Jydoq is proving difficult. Not only is he not very tech savvy and doesn’t answer his comms, he is also small and running all over the planet. He has expressed a lack of interest in evacuation. He said something about needing to fight just for the sake of fighting, because if the Jydoq are left to their own devices and spend the next decade seeing only the Hassani it will do damage to irrevocable damage to their culture and way of thinking. Essentially the agent reported he spent a good ten minutes making metaphors about the lessons of history and it all summed up to “nah I’ll stay here.” Don’t think we could catch him if we tried so the agent just let him do that.

Allison is back from Kuhas station after two weeks of prep to leave the station as well as many of our other bases as requested for the mass evacuation to the Flotilla. Though some of them are turning into Madhammer maniacs once given orders to start using all their bombs they had stashed up.

Moving the turrets of Enphidia however will be a bit more of an effort, there are a lot of them and between cargo and manpower it’s hard to get all of those off the ground they’re bolted to, they’re also the size of houses.

As for scouting Koura, the place is still a fortress that shows very little signs of activity outside of the rift to the Warrens. Most of the Hassani populace lives on Aureum. Koura and Somnus are largely being used as defensive stations and border control locations.

On the ground, the Valdir and Azilath have been destroyed by Kanika and her Tarrasque. The Tarrasque is now moving on towards Kar’Soluth territories. Orbital observation confirms it still possesses the abilities it once had in life. Firing upon it is more likely to harm the attacker than the target as it has the ability to reflect magic and shows no sign of damage from physical attacks. After the death of Azilath and the Valdir swarm, we lost track of Kanika and where she might be going next.

In Beldobaan our forces managed to defeat Azarov. However, the fighting took a turn for the worse when Sakhessa was brought in via portal along with her “Golden Legion”. Our troops augmented with Nelta technology are doing better, but Solian shields do nothing to stop their weapons. Even with the augmented shields prepared for this situation, her army are all undead golems covered in rather advanced super heavy armor similar to the EX soldiers. Our forces have been pushed to the base they took earlier in the fighting near one of the entrances to Beldobaan since Azarov, Reika, and Sakhessa keep posing significant problems in erratic positions around the battlefield. The 4th mech, madhammer, and 9th that were fighting with Sarghess are now fighting with Sakhessa’s forces while Sarghess left via portal once again to Jaal’Darya territory to combat our forces there once again.

Sarghess returned to Jaal’Darya when we tried to send the 8th back there. Though this time Decaelys is with them. We’re not sure what happened to them, but we’ve lost all contact with the 8th. Given what we know of Decaelys’ abilities, it is possible they’re still alive but in an isolated dimension. It’s also possible they’re all dead.

The fighting on the Cradle has seen further loss of control over the ship for the Voidforged due to Deinuu’s presence. With the Iron Cradle abandoning several sections to get rid of Deinuu, its firepower has diminished significantly. We still possess fleet superiority but we calculate that advantage will soon fade as Agallias continues to take ships down from the planet’s surface. However, Madhammer is still fighting in the detached sections of the Cradle. They have a general majority over the pirate boarders but the ship is so large that it is being fought in small skirmishes. Right now their priority has become preventing the escape of Deinuu or Nila so they do not get back to the rest of the Cradle.

Eleazor actually did better than even Chevalier against the cradle’s boarders but still fell victim to Nila.

The 5th mech cavalry made it to the borders of Sarghess territory and have been attacking Sarghess cities though progress is slow and half of their forces have been lost to Agallias so far.

Vasia was on standby for dealing with the RABE s hip once the Nomads had taken it but Director Tyne’s orders were for them to re-enter the fleet battle with it to see what chaos might result from it. So she’s still just on standby.

Sakhessa appeared at Beldobaan. Vairatoa and Selah are both dead. We thought Eerihild was dead, but after four hours of being dead she got back up somehow.

In contacting the Shetou leadership, they’re in a sort of state of shock upon seeing the return of the Tarrasque and how it managed to wipe out the Valdir swarm which was threatening to overtake the whole planet. Currently their hail mary is to stall for time before Kanika officially controls Sol and retreating Auni Kuu to a classified location to hopefully learn enough about necrocarnum before the war is over to deal with both the Tarrasque and Kanika. Though in the meantime they aren’t sure what to do about the other Phantoms. Everyone is stretched well past their limits. It would have taken a full fleet and army just to stop Agallias and he’s just destroying entire armies and ships with no one focusing on him at all because there are too many other problems happening at the same time. Keeping in mind this entire combined assault between the Federation, Shetou, and to some extent Valdir, was all just to target effectively one phantom, Yasrena. Then the rest began to attack and Kanika’s war is now beginning.

Alnae is gone, the Demon Kingdom don’t want a war with the Hassani and neither do the Abyssals. Now the shades patron god is Yasrena, Necrosi is largely either uninvolved or siding with whatever Sakhessa wants. While the Fae are hanging around Jamalia they aren’t exactly interested in joining a system-wide war on Thenica. Jydoq is fighting Kar’Soluth but they aren’t exactly organized against the phantoms and will probably abandon the fight as soon as they get their own planet under control. The vampire clans are largely being pushed towards siding with the Hassani because of the attack on Beldobaan and that includes the Desoir and De’Rex families. We were winning against Kar’Soluth, who represents one of the biggest power bases of the Phantoms. Shetou is aware that they either need to get everyone together or they need to kill Kanika and hope the power vacuum causes an internal collapse once Sakhessa and Asmodan start a schism.

In short, we’re outgunned by an order of magnitude. All of this fighting thus far has just been Yasrena’s assets with a showing from Faelyn who is middle management under Kanika.  So Shetou’s plan is to scramble desperately for time to deal with each of the phantom menaces one after the other, but they admit its not a good plan. They are also currently trying to convince the Demon Kingdom and Abyssals to come help on the basis that once Kanika becomes the Empress of Zonaricht-Sol they can’t rely on Alnae and Shetou, which are already both fucked, to keep the balance of things anymore. They have made some efforts trying to get Valdir fully involved and to recall Indal but they’re not having much luck on that front. The Silnian civil war is far bigger than the solian war.

In related news, Yasrena reports that Valencia was contacted by Laesaaria though that it didn’t go the way they had hoped. Despite Valencia’s notorious war-deciding economic dominance over Sol, it sort of lacks punch when dealing with a titan just shooting ships out of orbit. It’s not like he needs money to do that. Atop of that, it is likely that Valencia has already figured out that as the galactic awareness of Sol expands, Sakhessa is going to be the one to be friends with.

So that’s what Shetou is up to. We’ve been setting up the necessary equipment to move Eden out of her comfy spot, though its a bit of work overall. Things are going smoothly on that front though.

We built a new Jamalia. The elves are still scattered all over Enohas and so are the Fae that originally came through when we first opened the portal but hopefully they get the message soon. Before the forest becomes a fae forest.

Oh that reminds me, the Elementals haven’t shown up to Thenica yet but Mahuea pointed out that the Tarrasque is an issue just as it was back in the olden days. Because it reflects magical damage, if one of the Archons show up there is a chance that thing causes them to blow themselves up. Historically the creature just slept a lot and the best course of action was to leave it alone. Also in case you were curious, it was finally killed in the Era of the Purge from being poisoned in its sleep by the old Heroes Guild. That might not work against a lich variation though. Mahuea currently suspects that necrocarnum methods should be able to put it down but the problem is that means engaging the Tarrasque in melee combat and it is often near Kanika who is liable to defeat any other necrocarnate. He said he wants to send some agents to the far side of the galaxy to inquire about the Lakaaj and any other galactic incarnum based civilizations or life forms but needs a ship for said agents from us because he doesn’t have shipyards or a regularly functioning economy to buy things with.

The Nomads have successfully taken the RABE ship from the Iron Cradle after a chaotic and daring assault on the ship section. While the plan may have been to fly it of and cause some trouble in the fleet battle, they instead towed it out and used it as a flail. Probably should have been more specific. Though they report part of the problem is they can’t control it at all. It doesn’t use traditional Sol computer systems and psi crystals. It is an exerlus ship and likely is not intended to be piloted by an organic. We would need a special machine to interface with it that we could interface with to pilot it. Current suspicions are that only an exerlus or selona cyborg can control it, since we know that Nila has become one as well. Might be a way for the voidforged to do something with it but in the middle of a war is not the time to push buttons and see if we can safely get it to accelerate or turn left.

However, this was all possible likely because Nila and Deinuu weren’t there to defend the ship, neither were most of the boarding pirates and forces. The fight back on the Cradle is also still getting wildly out of hand.

As for Kennae, not so much with the murder padawans. He teaches a lot of restraint. Honestly the best tracker in the federation to find this assassin is…well the people we already have on it. We have made some progress in finding one of it again, but that encounter once again did not go well but did verify that there are multiple. Whether or not they behave independently or as a part of a whole is still unknown.

The fighting on Jydoq isn’t helping though as a lot of traditional security is down anyways from other issues. It is also hard to qualify suspicious behavior when everyone is trying to murder each other at the same time. At least the fighting here is going favorably for the Federation, most Kar’Soluth forces are diverted to Thenica. The open conflict Madhammer is engaged in is going largely unresponded to here on Jydoq. Though from the sounds of these reports, Thenica is not going nearly as well.

As for the plagues on the flotilla, they are largely contained to individual ships though those ships are effectively lost. We can’t send anyone into or out of them at the moment and the inhabitants are not doing well. Though given how many ships make up the flotilla, this is a relatively minor problem compared to what is happening in Moncayo and Zenaka where millions are dying.Though we will still need to either find some way to handle these plagues or just drop the ships into a star. We can wait for everyone aboard to die of the plague first though if it eases everyone’s collective consciences though.

Kaja points out he fought in the last 3 apocalypses and “ya’ll need to get your shit together”. Back in his day all he had was a dragonborn and a kobold with a grenade launcher. And they had to share that kobold. So he’s still retired.

As for the ongoing plagues, it appears the Hassani are very invested in preventing VSEC from taking the Jaal’Darya capital. Whether or not it even has the answers we need is unknown. We do know that they are sneaking through the portals disguised as ‘not Jaal’Darya’ members and we have intercepted a good few but there are lot of them. It is also likely that several locations were previously infiltrated before the war even began just to keep an eye on us. While meaningful medical advances have been made to slow or even vaccinate some of the plagues, every time we do another one just pops up. It isn’t a single crafted super disease, its dozens of different ones that all use different methods. In order to stop them in its entirety we need some way to find all of Jaal’Darya’s agents, which might come from taking their capital and leadership for interrogation. Even with Eden’s help curing some of them, more just keep appearing.

Chevalier fought valiantly but as it turns out, this Nila bitch is really dangerous. She took him down and Deinuu got Sacha. Adrienne kidnapped you and forced you to abandon ship through the portal to Jamalia. We’d have gone to Adelaide but Governor Laura over there has turned them all off. We discovered one very important thing, the Mummy Rot affects warforged. Since it infects mana itself, which is how it travels through mediums other than biological fluids and coughs, it can infect a voidforged as well. Including you and me. We don’t know if Chevalier and Sacha’s cores can be recovered, along with Vanessa and Sylvaine’s. Until the ship is secure its best we not be in the warpath of that giant mummy that is punching everyone.

Problem two, the rot can infect the ship itself. Which is why we had to evacuate rather than rely on things such as doors and airlocks to keep it contained. The Iron Cradle is experiencing mass system failures in areas where Deinuu attacked, sort of similar to as if they lost power. I’m told by Lancaster’s robot illusory projection assistant that this power can be diverted to the mummy who owns the rot. Which might be how he’s becoming harder and harder to stop in those hallways.

The crew forcefully ejected the chunks of the ship that are infected and containing pirates for now to buy time but now they’re sitting in orbit around Thenica in multiple pieces while being actively fired upon by opposing fleets. We still maintain fleet superiority in orbit but things are falling apart on the ground and most problematically, Agallias is just taking ships out of space over and over again. There also isn’t much to do with this naval position since the major battle is either underground in Beldobaan or is a giant monster of myth and legend that is immune to even the largest guns we have.

War reports. Our fleets arrived at Thenica and then things went fairly south. Upon engaging the Solvang pirates, the treaty fell apart. While it is a murky area whether or not that should count if Kar’Soluth didn’t, Faelyn’s retaliation definitely does. We currently maintain significant superiority in the orbital fight. However, the Iron Cradle is under heavy attack and has been boarded. Also communications with the cradle indicate that Preacher might be panicking.

The 4th Cavalry managed to force Vloz and Kenduis forces to retreat to the demon kingdom via pandem portal. They began to move towards Beldobaan afterwards though only half of their forces have been able to enter the cavern thus far, encountering heavy resistance from Sarghess forces holding the cave entrances. The only way through so far has been an area that Gunhild managed to damage enough for them to force through. However, soon after our fleet arrived in orbit, Azarov entered the conflict at Beldobaan. Given he is an elder black dragon, he is particularly problematic for mechanized forces to deal with since his draconic abilities disintegrate metal.

With our forces retreating from Jaal’Darya’s territory, Sarghess sent most of its forces to Beldobaan to reinforce the area. Reika is currently in Beldobaan with this deployment. The fighting in the Beldobaan capital is back into full swing now that Beldobaan agents have secured a position that can be used to bring Sarghess into the city.

Renjala opened a rift as he planned for if the Phantoms began to assist at Beldobaan, which probably saved a few lives.

The 5th currently has occupied Vloz’Khress territory and has control of it. The actual members of the Vloz’Khress forces that were fighting with the 4th mech cavalry have retreated to the demon kingdom alongside kenduis forces to regroup after some further fighting that went in our favor.

Kanika herself has reappeared at Thenica but she is primarily interested in the Valdir. She has summoned the Tarrasque from her personal castle to help fight them. The independent colonies around the wastelands of Thenica have also begun mobilizing, as many of them were under the control of Phantom operatives. The ones that weren’t are at the very least scrambling to get off world.

Prisoners of war have been turned over to Shetou as requested.

5th Madhammer is currently stomping around on Jydoq sucessfully as most Kar’Soluth forces are on Thenica right now. Though they are encountering fortified position and local garrisons of jydoq people.

Forces on Zenaka report that “cleaning it up” is a bit of anyone’s guess. Technically the local forces should have been able to hold control now that Valen dispatched of most of the territorial problem children, but with the ongoing plague and the tens of millions dead unrest has started to pop up again. Also Valen herself has become bedridden with the same plague as the other Zenakans.

We also have reports that infections have been spotted in Adelaide and Laura has responded to this by doubling down on her already extreme quarantine measures to try and prevent it from spreading as badly as it has elsewhere. Her gangsters are patrolling the streets now shooting anyone who leaves their houses and she has created a government logistics program to get food and necessities around without people having to leave their houses. The problem for her has become the Vessians. They’re not big on the whole ‘stay inside’ idea and they’re also all too strong for Laura’s gangsters and cops to actually apply much force to. She said to ask if we can send anyone who can actually control the Vessians. Technically her first ask was whether or not a certain someone she only has clearance to know exists because she was once an advisor was busy or not.

The newly renamed VSEC Medical is collecting samples as requested and they have found ways to mitigate at least two of the plagues if not outright prevent the spread of one of them. Though they also found another strain had popped up in Moncayo.

Apparently Azilath wanted to speak with Haziel if the galactic keepers of the cycle had ever found a way for a silnian to leave the synapse. Just to weigh her options. The answer was no but I imagine she’d really like some alternatives now that the treaty just went tits up and Kanika is coming for Azilath specifically it seems. Turns out despite the unending horde of drones that can just eat all the trees to make more of themselves, Kanika has a lot of experience with burning countrysides. Also the fucking tarrasque is loose now and oh dear christ I am not going anywhere near that fight. It’s likely that more of the Phantom’s forces will be creeping out soon and this is just the initial wave of “people who were already hanging around nearby”. We’re not sure if Sakhessa will send her forces away from Aureum as she likes keeping her fortress world safe and cozy.

As for opening portals to a star, doesn’t really shoot out of the rift but it does make it really toasty for whatever is in front of it. It actually pulls things into the rift rather than spits things out, so the test rock just got sucked into the sun. Likely because of the gravity of the star itself. If you opened a significant enough rift to kari on the other side of the rift to make it spit star stuff that might…uh…break a star but it would be really cool.

Also, second lance just came back with the rest of VSEC. As per earlier plans, the Hassani are involved now and even if it wasn’t Kanika herself in Beldobaan, Azarov was a significant enough problem when backed up by House Sarghess. Azarov is a particular problem for VSEC specifically, as a black dragon his acidic breath causes absolute havoc for mechs in particular. Eerihild was the only one holding him off while the rest were retreating since she’s all fleshy and regenerates. Definitely don’t want Holua to run into Azarov for that matter. Vairatoa was largely okay too, acid doesn’t do much to a walking fireball.

Irae and Ankathi have been on a long ass adventure through the shadow plane. You would think there’d be a much more detailed retelling of it but apparently surveillance equipment had issues in the absolute darkness or something. Either way the main point is they found out what the Revenants were up to. This entire attack was to keep The Shadow busy before The Shadow could realize they had discovered its identity. They pretty much just heisted the Black Library and we don’t know where they took it because The Shadow was sealed with old school anti-demon magic (that apparently just works on all planar entities). We also learned that Sarden and Morylan are a significant problem for Ankathi specifically. They didn’t have any trouble dealing with the aura of fate. Irae did some analysis and it turns out that since those two rely on true strike weapons, the power of fate doesn’t do much to them. This was bad news for a lot of the celestial forces that went with everyone, but the fact that they severely wounded Ankathi is…at the very least interesting. Though as it turns out, Ankathi is still one of the greatest warriors of her time and they couldn’t beat her sword technique straight up once the surprise factor wore off and Ankathi realized she had to actually try.

Also they found Yoshai. He wasn’t even in handcuffs or anything. He was technically their prisoner and any attempt to get away probably wouldn’t have gone well for him. Though he definitely didn’t try that hard. I’m not sure if we should blame the fact that they managed to seal the Shadow for his lack of morale or the fact that he was surrounded by a bunch of possibly attractive women depending on what those masks are covering. The sealing magic itself was broken quite easily but it had been keeping Shadow stuck in place this whole time while they heisted the library. However, Shadow informs us of the ramifications of this. Without Yasrena, Kar’Soluth’s war has been running on its own without guidance. Their exact words were “If I don’t get back the treaty will fall apart”.

I guess they were right about that.  Shadow is unhappy with this development. In their own explanation, this could lead to a Thenica controlled by a single group. Which means Selona might start getting more involved and the entire war was the only smokescreen they had. Shadow suggests that with this development it is critical to tell Jaerda to hurry up with the Astral Wilds business and stop doing councilor things for awhile before Selona decides to meddle.

Irae asked what you want her to do about Shadow because she can’t tell if she should be finishing the job for the Revenants or escorting Shadow back to a more secure position. In the meantime Ankathi is personally offended that any group had any means of hurting one of the pantheon  members even if it was just an old fashioned sealing spell. Let alone a group she has so little respect for as the Revenants. Starting to see how the old gods would get really pissy whenever mortals managed to thwart their plans.

Steamworks reports that its currently unable to contact Preacher since he is busy with the war on Thenica. Though they can probably figure out how to just put a big stick on diadem. Though the plates move slower than his ship and atop of that he is liable to just steal the stick itself. It’d be billions to make a stick that big that can also rotate enough to put itself in his ship’s way if he didn’t just sit conveniently right by it. It would also need to be able to extend from under the plate so that he doesn’t know where it is or what it could do before it tried to swat at him. I feel like they took this suggestion more seriously than you intended.

Though the portal to a bigger gun tank idea is a bit more feasible, it has a problem that whatever it is shooting at could ward the portal before it opened. That aside, the rest of the idea isn’t too hard. Though rather than a battleship they feel you would want just a gun strapped down to something that isn’t going to drift around in space. Probably by using one of the higher planes for more positional stability.

Haziel reports that if you want to use her sanctuary in the wilds, you caaaan but the problem is that its in the Fae Wilds and that means getting in or out is hard. She created sanctuaries that she can send people to other than the primary fixed location that Enohas uses, since distance is a problem when she’s working across the galaxy. A large part of how these sanctuaries work is that for many the option is to take their chances in the fae wilds or die to the imminent threat of silnians, jesai, and exerlus who have been causing the collapse of entire planets lately. So technically yes but don’t forget it should be generally expected to be a one way trip.

As for pantheon surveys about Indal, Ankathi wants to make him work for her somehow. Haziel doesn’t like him too much since he’s destroying worlds with his civil war against the silnians. Shadow is neutral on the matter but isn’t terribly happy with how hard he can be to convince to do anything. The man just wanders off and smacks things and no one can really convince him to smack what they want him to smack. Either way until his war in silnian space is over with it isn’t like he could be convinced to do much else. Jaerda, who should be a member eventually if she’d focus up, says she doesn’t know him personally but if he were to cooperate with us in any way he’d be a massive PR boost. After the Thousand Legends he’s basically Sol’s chosen one and if she could get him to show up to a single photo op she imagines approval ratings would go up. Jaerda also seems to have no concept of what we consider Indal though. She wasn’t at the battle and has never seen him in action. She thinks of him as a war hero that took credit for leading the Thousand Legends and is thus fairly popular. In her mind, it’s his armies and charisma that make him who he is. She has no ability to conceptualize that a human could do anything we know he can do. Or that he has the charisma of a potato.

Given that Adelaide recently had an infection issue, yeah probably time to stop people coming and going from Eden City.

Also we sent our fleet to Thenica with the VSEC fleet. It’s absolute hell.

In other news, with Shadow back, despite how well laid your plan was to contact them from afar it turns out they would have just been stuck floating in space until someone went and broke the seal for them. Though that does mean your proposal can more easily be responded to now.

To which they offer the counterpoint. Yeah crippling Kar Soluth isn’t going to help much. Alystra is its last member to be particularly threatening to the Federation. If anything, Alystra would have become the new Val’Hari in the absence of Yasrena since she’s been able to get things done even without Yasrena’s help. Also Reika is aligned to Kanika not Kar’Soluth, she’s just on loan while Kanika was busy.

They also revealed a slightly sentimental side. They are actually fond of their drow worshippers as a memory to their own origins. Proceeded by a rambling tale of all they had accomplished despite being one of the most fucked over races of Thenica. Even if now technically they can lay claim to being the patron god of the shades, the drow still are special in their own way.

The real issue here is all the Selona business as mentioned before. Also Shadow…slash Yasrena? Calling deities by their title all the time wears my mouth out, hence we just call her Ankathi and Haziel instead of by their deity names. Whatever, dark’n’spooky still intends to keep themselves playing in all sides as necessary until the threat of Selona is otherwise mitigated. It’s good to have a vacation home in case one empire falls into a civil war, and Ankathi is the most interesting thing the Federation has to them since she is the only one who is truly immune to Selona. Since she both can control future events and her main powerbase is so far away that not even Selona can influence it.

Also they point out you were correct that Lancaster wouldn’t retreat in time and that all this was bound to happen and now things are about to go really sideways.

As for meeting with Valencia, their main question was whether or not Eden would perform the cleansing because that’s the whole reason Pandem sucks. Then several questions as to your motives as that came out of nowhere and you didn’t even ask for anything. Then she just stalled it. Yasrena’s text messages blew up quickly after that meeting and pretty much confirms that Valencia doesn’t trust the offer and is investigating us heavily now. She isn’t a stranger to some really bold plays, though she also is aware that last time she tried such a thing she almost gained control over all of Sol. So extreme offers must come with extreme rewards for you that she can’t figure out just yet. Apparently “unifying people and stopping galactic chaos” is a very untrustworthy motive to her.

Also, yeah still no luck recruiting Jhaeros. I don’t get it either, he’s kind of a weirdo. Maybe we need to ask Renjala to make a love god and ship the two of them so he’ll calm the fuck down already. Don’t tell Vanjin I said that.

With VSEC invading Jydoq to assault Kar’Soluth, things have been getting crazy here. Though this has helped us with tracking the assassin since now they’re targeting VSEC officers. Problem is, four teams are dead from trying to intercept them whenever we get a good lead. Aryn can sometimes track them down but they’re never in a place where we can get enough personnel to deal with it in time. Kennae did fend them off once but they managed to escape. Judging by the encounter we’ve seen from Vanjin, they’re very dangerous and we might need someone with more combat experience than you three and more lethal methodology than Kennae.

Also using Kuhas as a launch point Haggard was able to find four Tungsten Teeth batallions in the market who we could hire.

The Nomads are currently aboard the Iron Cradle trying to help with the ongoing boarding combat happening there. Taking over other ships is somewhat difficult as they’re constantly exploding.

Also we’ve reports of some small pockets of infections happening aboard the Nomad flotilla. Since its a bunch of ships it is sort of naturally quarantined and it is unlikely to be as big of a problem as it is elsewhere, it is still notable that the Jaal’Darya did find a way in at all.

As for finding Kaja the punch man, he retired after the third nelta invasion and after Madhammer was absorbed into VSEC. He’s currently on some frontier world building cabins.

Our sources report that for some reason Kaylen has left Jydoq and headed back to Thenica. Can’t imagine why.

We have joined the orbital war over Thenica and engaged in combat. The problem is our ship is so large that apparently every assault carrier decided we looked really juicy and we are being boarded as I deliver this report. The ship is so large that the fighting inside is starting to look a lot like the fighting groundside. Next problem, along with regular boarders, that exerlus ship cut into our hull and deposited some weird elf girl with two pistols and we have lost every corridor she walked into. There are solvang pirates everywhere and I already tried venting the place but the space pirates had space suits. Was worth a shot.

Not all of our missing turrets were destroyed, we just have lost control of the sections they’re connected to and the boarders have taken them offline. Though the shields are strained as well, we lost one of our power generators in those sections and we’re being fuckin hammered by Agallias.

Chevalier has retaken control of some important hallway sections but Vanessa and Sylvaine have been destroyed. No news on whether or not their cores can be recovered just yet as we don’t have control of the area they fell in.

Interior automated defenses are holding up but these pirates seem reaaaaally good at this whole boarding thing. I’m also told the big guy who just tore Sylvaine in half is named Deinuu and his presence is part of the reason our generators are experiencing major fluctuations.

We have majority power over the fleet conflict and our guns are putting in work, especially now that two of the enemy titans are down but they’re keeping the Areti well protected and its gun hurts. There are more ships incoming to board us and I suspect that some of the enemy assault carriers are being used as staging points for Kar’Soluth to rift people aboard and then send more waves in through the MASSIVE HOLE in the eighth district hull.

A-hem, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Stories of Lore 61

We really need to stop Lancaster from leaving her office, half the time she does this we don’t see her for months.

First off, war reports. Beldobaan has switched majority control back to Kar’Soluth when Sarghess sent a deployment of mechs to assist the area, pulling them away from their Jaal’Darya front. This comes largely in the form of piloted mechs but it has pressured our forces into cover which has made dealing with the Beldobaan natives difficult. Gunhild is currently stranded in Beldobaan with her team. This seems to happen to her a lot.

The battle at the Jaal’Darya compound has seen heavy losses. Sarghess is thoroughly entrenched into the position and Jaal’Darya has been releasing more chimeras. We’ve seen a large shipment of Sarghess mechs on both battlefields as they decided to purchase more and take their soldiers off the field to crew them.

The attack on Kenduis and Vloz went heavily in our favor. The Kenduis conscripts were not terribly reliable and there were several mutiny attempts into surrenders. So we got some prisoners out of that, notably  they are from Alnae originally. However, this battle took place close to the Alnae border, we have received information from Larazja that the Valdir will be attacking everything within a certain range of themselves, leaving us in that range. We already have confirmed the mobilization of Valdir. With what we know, we expect them to reach the Kar’Soluth border within two months, though whether or not they continue into Kar’Soluth territory depends on further orders from the synapse depending on Azilath’s progress.

The battle in orbit has become a bit clearer. Sharen’s allies consist of foreign fleets 1 and 3, they are aliens we haven’t contacted before and obviously now isn’t the best time to figure anything out about them. Foreign fleet 2 turned out to be from Jydoq and represents Kar’Soluth. The fighting got a lot more violent due to orbital positioning and the presence of Agallias causing a lot of problems.

It turns out Rahlken doesn’t  understand planes very well and he hung around the coordinates of Zenaka on the wrong plane for a few days looking for the planet before leaving and heading in the direction of the Reach.

Haziel extracted Song Auni and sent her back to Song Clan’s capital city.

The Vampire clans all appeared in the Sol system though they are parked over SR2 on Rixa instead of Thenica. It appears they are amassing their forces, similar to the nations of Necrosi and the elemental plane all preparing in case this spills into anything larger.

The blockade on the Hasao Tei has ended as peacefully as it could, with the Hasao leaving with the Hydra’s ships to go hang out at Koura for now.

In local news. We discovered that the Caelkians became galactically capable very recently. No one could explain it specifically but after piecing together the story we figured out that their FTL capable ships only became possible shortly after Haziel messed with plants and how they interact with both people and mana. Their fleet is young but is actually better equipped for galactic travel than most standing fleets who are playing catch-up with what Haziel did, as theirs are entirely based on that new property.

Also Diadem reports a bit of a minor problem. Due to the quarantine we’ve had to be a bit careful with alien visitors from the Reach. However, this is also happening at a time when the Reach is feeling us out and the quarantine is not helping our PR.

Jaerda has been at Panemperia for her studies towards surviving the Astral Wilds, which is why she wasn’t at Jamalia. Though we can send her back to Jamalia, if nothing else that is at the forefront of her mind right now anyways.

As for Yoshai, we know the Revenants grabbed him and went to the Shadow Plane. Which seems like a bad place to be in order to combat the god of the shadow plane while trying to hold their prophet. Then again I suppose they are threatening a direct confrontation. The main guess is if they would have gone to the library again given that Shadow created it but it is still one of their main bases of operation. Not that we’ve ever been able to find it. Either they returned to a place that is Shadow’s seat of power to fight for it, or they went elsewhere to establish another base.

However, the situation has developed a bit while we were looking over at the war. Ankathi has gotten involved directly, sending Kharla and several celestials into the Shadow plane after them. At the most recent meeting with Selah, it appears that despite recent developments Ankathi would still rather keep her pantheon together and finds Shadow valuable enough to see about rescuing. Maybe I’ve been in this Selona business for too long but I’m not sure how I feel about the one person who knows how to destroy a plane going into the plane that their enemies are trying to destroy. Does that feel like a trap to anyone else or am I just getting paranoid? Not that Ankathi would listen to me, or anyone else for that matter.

In other news, the Federation sent plague samples to Eden to see if she can synthesize a cure. Three of her avatars have died in the lab attempting to do so. It is extensively quarantined so it hasn’t spread anywhere outside of the lab, but worth noting that one of the, now nine, diseases is especially dangerous to Eden. Also it doesn’t help that she went through two avatars before agreeing to use a damned suit and some tools other than her hands. Which has stabilized the research now that we have convinced her of the importance of personal protective equipment, though she definitely operates slower with tools than her hands. Though we have learned they are constantly introducing more types of plague agents to the mix as they go and are actively adding more to the pool of areas they could infiltrate. Notably, half of the Nevun swarm in Roha has dropped dead and are rapidly dying off. Vasia had extracted Larazja but now Setal is in a quarantine hospital. Samples indicate that they infected the ichor lake itself and if Larazja ever goes back to it, she will be infected quickly as well.

Vasia points out this is important, because Silnians are supposed to be completely immune to almost everything. Only the rot had ever posed a threat to them. She suspects the fact that they are in the Abyss instead of Rixa has an impact on their mutation speed. Though it also means that Eliza has been messing with silnians of some sort some how. She should not have had anything that could effect them. As an experiment, they released one of the koura parasite…dog things that Vasia made and it also got sick. Which is another life form that is immune to almost everything that Eliza definitely shouldn’t know how to infect at all. Every one of those experiments has been constantly accounted for by New Age and only left the labs once or twice. Vasia says she hadn’t sent any data on them to Eliza or anything so she isn’t sure how Eliza figured out how to create something so sticky that it could affect biological mutating super organisms.

On the war front, the first and third lances are stranded at Beldobaan, Sarghess sent a mech legion into it while Federation Forces were fighting around the Alnae border with the Vloz’Khress and Kenduis armies. Though Eerihild’s report on the situation was “meh we’re fine at least.” The sarghess reinforcements were their signature C3 mech which has established control of larger targets, but the knights are largely ‘dudes on the ground’ who can move between city streets to avoid the mechs. Granted, the vampires are still an issue and Eerihild is known for being a bit cocky.

Our encounter with the engurians did not go well but it was a rather complicated visit. They demanded we turn back upon approaching their border. However, this hostility seems based around a recent skirmish on their border. Another ship from the eastern side of the galaxy passed through this month, so it was really inconvenient timing for us.

The cradle sent word to the pandem radar station at Moncayo to take a look around. There is a ‘small’ fleet passing through engurian space and it appears that they are moving towards one of four places. Either Zero North, the Zhulkite border, the hostile facility, or uhhh…us. All four are in their currently charted path, though they might be going towards something we have no idea is out here too. The fleet includes a super assault carrier and is accompanied by a couple of battleships and other smaller ships. It actually should not have been able to get through the engurian borders but somehow it did.

I wouldn’t say relations with the engurians are completely broken down just yet, but they are on edge after this fleet passed through their territory and apparently ignored all their rules, then somehow evaded capture and won three combat engagements on their way through.

Tailing the ships leaving the Warrens reveals they go all over the place. To the point that there isn’t anything consistent about their paths after exiting. Currently we suspect they are dropping off supplies and prisoners to the facility but then leaving for other tasks. We’ve been tailing one in particular, Rampart’s logs show that it eventually went to Kuhas. No one at Kuhas seemed to notice or care about the ship. I don’t think anyone knows where it came from, and Kuhas is sort of a large rest stop.

Well we found the jydoq assassin, on Thenica. Given that we know they are at Jydoq as well, this has updated our database on them. There is more than one. All identifying information we have about the assassin matches both appearances. According to Vanjin, the assassin at Thenica had knowledge and interest in Kennae. So either they are rotating or they have some sort of connected memory. We know the jydoq multiply through asexual means, they just split themselves and boom new jydoq. With this information, it is logical to assume the assassin does the same thing to some extent. Though we don’t know enough about the actual rules its multiplication follows.

As for Kuhas, that hits a snag. Most of the gangs have no interest in fighting station security since it doesn’t result in much benefit to them. It is a neutral station that just serves as a trade port. Uniting to take over it leaves someone new in charge but with no clear benefit to the gangs that already exist and run territories. However, the risk is massive. No one can bring heavy weaponry into the station but the station security has such assets. The only way to take the station by forceful revolution would involve assaulting it from the outside with a fleet to get heavy weapons deployed to its interior.

We’ve also had some cryptic words from other Kuhas gangs that we should probably be a little less ambitious. Between the Federation and Rampart making moves, the local denizens have noticed something is fishy. Our proper operatives report that a lot of the gangs are becoming wary of the relationship between Rampart and the Federation. We’ve also learned that some of them have been traveling to Diadem to investigate the Federation as a result.

Stories of Lore 60

The ongoing occupation of Beldobaan has turned to some rather bloody fighting now that the Vloz’Khress and House Kenduis have shown up. The numbers are largely in our favor on this front and the city remains firmly under our control at the moment. The attack on Jaal’Darya itself has been almost entirely routed and current analysis predicts that our current forces will not be able to break any deeper into the Jaal’Darya headquarters before being wiped out. The attack on Sarghess Territory was halted by Agallias destroying the terrain so significantly that reaching the bases with mechanized units was becoming impossible.

The fleet battle in orbit of Thenica has begun to die down with all sides taking significant damage but Sharen is currently taking the worst of it and depending how the next key conflicts go whether or not they will be able to win. Though as we know two large groups of reinforcements are on the way from outside the system, so they may just need to hold out a little longer to regain dominance in orbit.

Song Auni has reappeared within the borders of Beldobaan to hide out from Kanika. We have promptly received notice to turn her over within the week or we can expect Kanika to assault Beldobaan herself. This will involve the entire Hassani entering the war immediately. We also received word from Sakhessa that the matter involving the Song Clan has taken Kanika’s priority over listening to herself back at Aureum. The treaty can only stand as long as Kanika doesn’t decide to attack and Sakhessa can’t stop her from her relentless pursuit of Song Auni. She cautions to do something about Song Auni before Kanika attacks, once the treaty is negated then Sakhessa says she herself will be obligated to show up and that will also prevent her from continuing to block Jaal’Darya from using the rot infused plagues.

I noted she sounded very stressed and frustrated.

The interception of the Hasao Tei fleet was met by a small fleet that declared itself under the flag of the Hydra. One of the Hassani, who also declared the Hasao to be under its holdings as of hours before our fleet got there. Apparently they convinced the Hasao to sign onto its ever-growing collective of smaller entities to avoid being shot by us. Which poses an issue since that means the Hasao just became members of the Hassani…not sure about that play though given the long history of Hassani’s treatment of ‘mortals’. They might have kind of shot themselves in the other foot this time.

Meanwhile the Caelkians, who have no idea any of this is happening at all, wouldn’t mind help with building a space station. They have their own but they’re all very last-gen and they think ours are fancier. They’re also particularly interested in security pacts because of the abundance of pirates in the Reach. They don’t know the amount of other security threats we’re involved with yet.

So how’d the meeting go?

The lances are taking heavy losses fighting at Thenica but are still overall ahead in terms of overall forces. The Federation still has more firepower available on Thenica. Though judging from the sounds of it, the treaty is breaking down which might swing things dramatically out of our favor.

Also Irae is back, alone. She still regenerates in your plane if she dies despite the loss of the phylactery, and its a good thing it works that way. According to her, things on the Blaiken world haven’t gone great. She and Lancaster were both executed in the throne room and they probably kept Sarrai. Irae is not as terribly familiar with the ‘Lancaster special’ so I’m not sure if Lancaster is dead or if Irae doesn’t know that Lancaster is just half naked in some corner.

Either way, she’s out of commission for a bit to recover from being murdered.

The main issue with establishing an embassy with the Zhulkites is how scattered they are ever since communications went down. While they’re not exactly opposed to the idea, the problem becomes where to put it. Since they have broken down into smaller alliances and territories with the disruption of trade and communication, at best we can ring up some random patrol base and its nearby couple of systems it can reasonably reach. Which is a start none the less, just pointing it out.

We had VSEC send some people to check in on the engurians but similar to our issue with the Zhulkites, its a bit of a trip so they’re working on that.

After some, very long extended observation, we have noticed ships that do come and go from the facility. This planet is a warrens exit but it does not appear to be an entrance. Ships will occasionally appear here from a Warrens exit but then will fly off elsewhere into the galaxy.

Rampart has been continuing their work assisting Lancaster with trying to expand influence on Kuhas. Though it has been hitting a weird ceiling. Kuhas is still operated primarily by their own security force, and their word is law since they will just shoot anyone who doesn’t obey them within three seconds. Every time Rampart expands a bit further they get shut down in minor ways by station security. Who we can’t ask for further details and as mentioned before, will open fire very quickly if disobeyed. Knowing what we do about them, this behavior is within the realm of automatons. Though it hasn’t been just us having this issue, other major gangs on Kuhas have similar problems where the larger they get the more often they run into security and get entire operations shut down by some guys dispersing them as if they were a normal crowd in a place that a crowd should not be. It doesn’t necessarily seem targeted, more like an automated response to certain but inconsistent parameters.

Meanwhile at Jydoq, Kennae is still wandering around playing superhero with his sidekick Kaylen with shockingly little of a plan. Though he has a following of jydoq who have become interested in the zankist arts. At best we have determined the jydoq assassin to be living in dense areas that usually have some political relevance. Given what we know about their diet that makes a lot of sense either way. As it is right now, Kar’Soluth has been relatively quiet as they are likely focused on the war in Sol more so than their political scheming over at jydoq. So at the very least there is a convenient lull in their activities.

The Nomads report a major issue with pirating Thenican supply lines. The major supply lines for Kar’Soluth aren’t using traditional shipping methods. Sarghess in particular is using Renjala’s Rift to transport themselves and their supplies around. So while they are finding occasional things to scoop up, none of it is impacting the front lines.

Also our counter-ops reported stopping an attempt by Jaal’Darya to introduce the plagues to the Nomad Flotilla. While we’re on high alert for any other attempts or signs of infections popping up, it’s worth mentioning that they’ve taken notice of the Flotilla.

Stories of Lore 59

Greetings Koda, in the absence of Lancaster once again you have command until we can re-establish contact with her. I do not envy you.

The war effort has seen further development with Kar’Soluth’s reinforcements finally arriving. I will try to summarize quickly.

The Vloz’Khress and their demon allies have arrived at Thenica and are moving towards Beldobaan. I would suggest reserving the movement of Tyne’s sister until after things settle down. Asmodan and his fleet have arrived at Thenica as well, among their number is the notable ship that Haleh reported as attacking her en route to Aureum when she first left Diadem. We do not know if it belongs to Nila Whately or the exerlus she was with at the time. It boasts a significant technological advantage over every other ship involved.

House Kenduis is also sending some of their forces to Beldobaan but the majority of their forces are currently taking or retaking areas inside of Alnae, judging by the positioning they’re being particularly cautious of Azilath and the Valdir.

Yasrena used the Renjala’s Rift spell to send Sarghess to Jaal’Darya in response to us sending forces there as well. Reika is with them once again. Jaal’Darya’s headquarters is built into the side of a cliff and we’re fighting in tunnels all over again. The initial strike did not go as well as hoped and the fight is still ongoing with the Sarghess forces who are entrenching deeper into their position by the day while we’re still trying to find a way to get inside. Also Eliza Pierce is here and pulled a Si-Yeon on us and released an army of chimeras onto our forces to support Sarghess.

We have majority control of Beldobaan territory right now but it isn’t a smooth occupation. Pockets of skirmishes keep breaking out within the city with vampires hiding in sewers, vents, and other strange places that would not be typical. Posing some challenges in containing the guerilla attacks on our forces.

Apparently attacking Faelyn in orbit above Kar’Soluth territory has drawn the attention of several members of the Hassani. Azarov and Agallias have appeared on Thenica to assist Faelyn in the fight against Shetou alongside the expected Asmodan. The largest problem of which being Agallias who is able to attack ships in orbit on his own as well as obliterate ground forces that get anywhere near the Sarghess base he is nearby.

Decaelys, Kanika, and now Deinuu are planetside without any significant army behind them but their hunt for Song Auni continues. Who we have not been able to find either and we’re not sure if Laesaaria was able to get word to her about our offer.

Valen reports evidence of Jaal’Darya style infections on Zenaka, they have far less technological assistance to aid in quarantine and she is actively still fighting the rebellion, who may have aided the Jaal’Darya.

The Hasao Tei have resigned from the Federation, taking a deal with the Jaal’Darya to escape the incoming war. They left Moncayo and went into the frontier on their own. In their place, they let the Jaal’Darya through the entire portal network in exchange for cures for their own people. Considering their civil security force was a part of maintaining the quarantines in Moncayo like last time, this has caused a catastrophic breach.

The Revenants launched the largest assault we’ve seen them attempt into Eden city. Apparently they retrieved Alakira and the other surviving original members and expanded their roster once again.

Haziel is currently on Enohas helping the somewhat stranded elves not all turn to cannibalism…again.

A small team of Tungsten Teeth members, unassociated with the ones we hired previously, appeared at Moncayo. They killed thirty eight people and wounded a hundred and sixteen before kidnapping Larazja from Roha and extracting her through the Moncayo portal network. Though we later found out this was actually Vasia’s doing to “secure her most important asset while she was away”. Larazja has been forcefully relocated to the asteroid base of New Age. Leaving Roha, in the middle of its ongoing pandemic, without it’s technical leader.

The Vessians are still hanging around Beldobaan with our other forces. Despite everything that’s going on, we have learned a lot about the combat capabilities of their species from all this. It’s a lot.

Azilath has also arrived on Thenica in the heart of former Alnae territory, to the confusion of many . While she didn’t bring her full army with her, given how silnians operate we’re a little concerned that she’ll just make a new one on the spot. Though given that all the fighting, and where she is now, is not on the Rixa plane we’re not entirely sure how dangerous she actually is. We have no idea why she’s here, but she is one of the queens of the ‘war cult’ so its ominous none the less.

We’ve also detected three other large forces approaching Sol from outside of the system, all from different directions. Laesaaria confirms that two of them are allies of hers from their own galactic misadventures. She has no idea who the other one is but would assume the Hassani have friends as well who might be nearby enough to come visit.

In summary: Sol War III is officially on schedule. Sakhessa is the only person of note who is particularly absent and is somewhere on Aureum complaining that this is why she can’t have nice things.

Oh right and the Caelkians do have a prevailing if not somewhat unified government. They do have independent nations on their homeworld but almost all of them are signed to an alliance to represent them as a planet. The people who didn’t sign are rapidly becoming economically irrelevant compared to those who banded together and went to space.

We’ve heard from Mahuea that the elementals have offered premonitions, dozens of them from several Archon’s purviews, that things are about to get really bad really quickly. Also that they’re pretty sure it’s either Lancaster or Yasrena’s fault.

Apparently one of the thunder archons has been preparing a super weapon for just such an occassion. It’s himself. Apparently the elementals have decided that if this gets out of hand they’re going to release the Archon of Thunder into the middle planes and effectively destroy all technology. It’s never even been tested before so it could have a range of a hundred miles or it could EMP the entire galaxy. Probably the former since there’s more than one archon of lightning and they have found reason to believe there are others across the galaxy.

I’m not sure it’ll come to that, but I suppose its just interesting to know that while they don’t really want to be involved in a war of this size, they’re concerned we’ll bomb ourselves into extinction and they have their own final measure to prevent that from happening. Aww, and here I thought they didn’t care about us. It’s more thoughtful than sending Mahuea at least.

Oh and the Revenants attacked Eden City in fucking force. Seriously there were four dozen of them, I didn’t even know there were that many. Granted, no one of ours is dead. Two revenants are, which our knights managed to take down, Tenebrys was captured – no idea who the fuck they are and interrogation has gone very poorly. A whole lot of knights were taken down but the Revenants didn’t use lethal measures so actually they’re fine. They did however bomb the Order of Shadow’s temple and disappeared through a Pandem rift into the Shadow Plane. Also Sarden and Morylan were spotted at Jydoq when they kidnapped Yoshai. Eden also mentioned that three unknown people, likely Revenants, went onto the surface of the planet while all of that was happening. They went to the cave your Phylactery was once stored, it isn’t there anymore obviously but the fact that they went to check is somewhat concerning. The waterfall squid monster ate one of them but was grievously injured in the fighting.

Alakira is back and that has some interesting ramifications. It means the mummy rot of Sakhessa can in fact be cured, albeit it apparently requires a silnian to do it. Also Alakira is now technically a member of the Valdir. Though given how Indal operates, I don’t think that’s too bad of a deal for her given the alternative was a very long and painful death.

As far as we can tell, via however they keep getting information on us they learned about The Shadow and quite possibly that it is the owner of the Black Library. Which they depend on heavily. I can’t tell if they have some sort of hit on the Shadow because they did some warcrimes we don’t know about, or perhaps its a mutiny, or they just want to keep us far away from them as not to compromise their own intelligence network or something. That or some other weird ass conspiracy, the Revenants are kind of always doing their own nonsense. We have also not heard from The Shadow since, probably because their temple wing got blown up and their high prophet is now missing.

Back at Enohas, the loss of Jamalia isn’t too severe. I mean yes, those poor elves, but statistically most of them were outside of the colony trying to establish new colonies to begin new lives. Haziel has been tending to them but has now enforced that they cannot leave their appointed territories due to the quarantine. The Jaal’Darya infection has taken root in a few of their satellite colonies and Eerihild is rather concerned as to whether or not it could affect Haziel herself. While it is unlikely given that she’s immune to practically everything, it would be catastrophic if it could. Haziel sure seems to think it won’t affect her and has just been handling the sick without any reservations.

Jaerda, who isn’t even on Enohas, is having a bit of a mental breakdown over all of this. She’s been begging for some help in going after Rahlken, apparently among those taken were several politically important individuals since Jamalia was being used as the temporary capital of Alnae-on-Enohas. Also her family, who she had gotten the cushy suites at Jamalia instead of being assigned to hut-building like the rest of the peasants. These requests involve trying to contact the Nomads ever since she learned they were part of the Federation even if a bit aloof stealing ships from everyone else for their flotilla.

I haven’t seen her since you got back with apparently most everyone just not the structure of the colony itself. Which honestly is a pretty easy rebuild, that thing was our first colony attempt and probably due for some upgrades. We hadn’t even really done much with it ever since discovering Eden could fix the corruption.

Speaking of which, even though you’re a planar entity made of skeleton, do you need an ice pack after that? We may need to re-assess our threat assessment of Rahlken. Technically he hasn’t prevented us from our objectives very often, but it is quite clear that actually beating him in combat is extremely difficult. He’s been getting stronger with every encounter we have since he keeps stealing more and more traits. Given your recollection of him taking powers from you and Haziel, I gather that the next time we see him will be even worse.

Oh and the radar station pointed out that after you rescued the elves he redirected his course and is now en route to Zenaka.

Also the knights and VSEC soldiers that went to the station in the northern galaxy report back that they ran into resistance very early. Though they did get a chance to look around, and the place was quite techy with a lot of robots doing automated menial tasks. They did however encounter a trio of extremely hostile inhabitants. All five knights and fifteen of the VSEC soldiers died before they could retreat through the portal. It was described as fighting one of those psionic engineers who had turret drones, but the drones were starship level weapons and the engineer was teleporting all over the place while shooting them through walls. Despite the scanner descriptions of their technological advantage over us, this is the first time we’ve seen what that looks like in a combat situation. ‘Halfway between us and the exerlus’ seems a fitting description.

Also you might want to prepare yourself, next month is your meeting with the Demon King and the Council of Lords. Which might disrupt your ability to run around opening portals all over the galaxy for a bit.

Intel report: We’ve been keeping an eye on Beldobaan and by extension that has now turned into “vampire affairs investigations” because its getting out of control around here. Sangui De’Rex has mobilized their fleets, our agents discovered that Sabrae was extracted from Beldobaan by Yasrena and is now currently being guarded by the De’Rex family. The big bad sivataur super duper chief -and colleagues- is meeting with the Desoirs.

Our counter ops against Beldobaan have at least made it statistically clear that they have been relocating away from the capital to continue their more covert operations away from the main siege efforts of Lancaster and instead are having the more militant houses deal with that. Yasrena likely has a strong interest in retaking the area since it is an ancient house’s ancient home and the Kar’Soluth are nothing if not fans of ancient drow bullshit. They’re just not having Beldobaan themselves focus on messing with us.

Also you should really stop fighting down there yourself its making everyone nervous.

Also since at this point it seems like practically everyone is involved we went ahead and checked in on the Abyssals. They’re confused as to what and why any of this is happening. Which I suppose is actually a good thing. Though Necrosi’s civilization has started the process of mass arming its people and raising their army through conscription. So far it looks like its more of a “just in case this gets any bigger” situation but its another piece on the board to keep tabs on. As if we didn’t have enough of those going on at the moment.

The teams we sent planetside at that ruined planet have managed to approach for observation of the facility. Though command told them to hold off after we got word of what happened aboard the station to the knights and VSEC. The problem with the facility is that it is highly secure, there is only a single door to the entire place and its located right by the landing pads for ships. There are no windows and the perimeter is full of automated defenses. This is either a secret military research facility or a prison. One way or the other, things aren’t supposed to be getting in or out of here. Given that the VSS Raptor is docked at the station above, I am leaning towards prison personally. Further scans reveal the facility is much larger than it looks as it has an underground layer to it that goes quite deep. Very few people ever enter or exit the place. We kept on observation to wait to see if they get resupplied but saw nothing that looked like a supply shipment.

I’m leaning towards prison still. Infiltration would likely require a lot more information than we can get from observation. We’d need to know whats inside and what security measures they utilize, also what the people inside even look like. We’ve seen some people entering and exiting and they look shockingly humanoid. Like Vessians with pure white hair, but from a safe observational distance we can’t tell what makes them distinct from one another. They all look so identical that infiltration via disguise runs the risk of completely misunderstanding how they identify one another.

If we want to try and infiltrate the place, we need to find other places where this civilization would be in order to observe and collect more data on them. This facility is too secure for us to base our plans just on seeing small glimpses of them. If we wanted to try and assault the place, we’re going to need a lot more resources judging by the report from those that went aboard the station. That and some sort of missile counter system. They have a lot of missile launchers as part of their automated defenses.

Science rarely goes as planned, engineering is more art than science. One must place the brush where it wants to go. I made more crab bots by the way.

Currently with a massive war going on back in Sol, I feel like things are awfully quiet around here in the galactic north despite the falling empires.

Adrienne reports that in summary the meeting with the Zhulkites wasn’t too bad. Their border patrol stations are quite friendly if you try to dock with them instead of flying past them. Though it is likely the Engurians will attack us immediately since they can detect we are machines.

They did mention that in order to deal with that, it would help to come up with a plan to either signal to them that we are not exerlus, or get them in a position where they wind up talking with us on accident…or force! We could practice the traditional arts of piracy maybe and just kidnap a few then tell them we just want a passport. I’m sure that’d go well. Actually that’s not a terrible idea.

With the Exerlus wars reaching a scale we can only comprehend with math and ‘well that looks bad’ it is unlikely we can rely on the Iron Cradle’s brute force to get us through those areas. Thankfully with the help of Echo Prime we at least can get up to date information on where those battles are being fought and avoid them. Notably, this is something the Zhulkites do not have access to since their own communications have been disrupted by these wars destroying deep comm towers. Even if we had Adrienne hand over all of the data to the outpost she’s at, they can only tell a few nearby locations that information let alone their entire alliance or even the larger mass that was their former alliance.

I’ve done some further analysis on what Adrienne sent, they’re still at the outpost as a guest of the zhulkites. Apparently as a species they actually are one of the most technologically progressed hive world civilizations. That is to say, they are silnian descendants. Not terribly relevant but interesting none the less for anyone keeping count of galactic origins, which has become a thing some of the federation’s scholars have been very interested. Something something, mysteries of the universe.

They rely on sahad magic to get around and don’t use typical ships as we know them. Often just creating mobile asteroid bases they cut in half to make a nice flat spot to build on top of since as a people they’re basically all capable of surviving in space due to sahad magic.

Stories of Lore 58

From the Pandem Radar station, the Outsider was detected inside of the Blaiken territory near the undead star. Rahlken’s ship is just a bit north of Jydoq as it continues making its way towards Paizurus and is expected to be there within the month. We can’t sweep for Yaellah since they are neither a pandem entity or a ship.

Kennae is still running around Jydoq chasing after the assassin and said it would be nice if someone could find them for him. Maybe stick a tracking chip on them. Noel is currently still at Thenica driving around looking to pick fights with random pockets of drow.

Speaking of Thenica, the siege of Beldobaan is getting more chaotic. At night vampires and drow attack even fortified positions and have been killing any of our soldiers they can catch in poor positioning. Though this usually means those specifically on guard or watch for them. Sarghess bombardment continues otherwise despite them under attack by House Song.

Cazvrath pointed out that House Song has a bad habit of feeling like they need to do everything themselves and can be sometimes difficult to coordinate with. They’re currently attacking Sarghess from the east if you want to send troops. However she is concerned that House Song seems much more disorganized than they should be. Typically they move as a singular large force but they’ve been split a few times and then try to regroup only to have the same issue reappear. The House’s command structure has noted that troops keep getting confused on which way the army is going and this is obviously abnormal but they haven’t figured out exactly what Kar’Soluth are doing to cause it.

Speaking of Sharen, Faelyn showed up and after a long stretch of international diplomacy breaking down wound up engaged in a fleet conflict with Sharen in orbit over Thenica. Said battle is still ongoing with fleets of this size, while Sharen has a clear upper hand it has given Kar’Soluth forces an orbital presence in the area. More importantly, firing on Faelyn has caused a diplomatic complication. Remember how we gave Kanika the spell Renjala uses to get around? She’s here now.

She’s with Sarghess at the moment so we can’t attack them or we risk hitting her and nullifying the treaty. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in what we’ve got going on with Beldobaan over here and has her own reasons to be here but it is still noteworthy that she’s running around causing problems especially for Shetou.

The assault into Beldobaan managed to establish control of one of the tunnel entrances that has a bit of an awkward curve that renders the Beldobaan fortress defenses a little less efficient. Though the tunnel was collapsed behind them in response which destroyed a large amount of the force. Using Renjala’s rift we were still able to get in to follow behind the 1st special force and establish ourselves near the eastern wall of the city. Going deeper into the city proved challenging. Also vampires, vampires everywhere. Nearly-feral Däjer vampires that just throw themselves into combat without much thought behind it. The battle in the capital city is still ongoing as checking every nook and cranny of a place known for secret passages and strange doors is proving difficult. Six of the vals have been captured but we haven’t been able to find Sabrae herself yet.

Koura Cures is moving forward with efforts to mitigate the plague distribution in Moncayo. Si Yeon has analyzed some of the properties of the disease and found that there are more than one. She has found at least four entirely different infections. Two of the four have very delayed symptoms, resulting in people being unaware they have them for long periods of time after initial infection. Those ones have spread much further than initially anticipated and while quarantines are still in effect they keep starting new infections across Cayetano. It is likely the agents that spread it intentionally are still doing so.

We have heard that Laura King has shut off the portal terminals to Moncayo and Cayetano entirely so that no one can reach Diadem and now has people who look suspiciously not like cops standing around with guns and we believe they have orders to kill anyone who comes through. They’re not federation security staff, they’re her gangsters. Which might cause some awkward miscommunications. On the other hand, Adelaide does not have any Jaal’Darya bullshit spreading around it so it is kind of working. Nah division reports finding out that she worked with the Revenants off the books to accomplish this.

On the other hand Cayetano’s infection problems are escalating despite Si-Yeon’s efforts and this has resulted in an oddity of people trying to leave Cayetano to get to Zenaka and Enohas – average people don’t know Rahlken is headed there – where they think they’ll be better off. While quarantine measures don’t allow them to do so, not all of them are filling out the paperwork properly and security around the portal terminals has been increasing by the day.

Speaking of Zenaka, Valen is still trying to squash all the little problems that keep popping up with rebellious insurrections and new territory lords being murdered by other people to create even more problems. In her own words “she’s working on it geeze”

In galactic news, the Caelkians are at the very least interested though coming from a position of pre-galactic awareness and not even a fully united planet they are slow moving and bureaucratic when it comes to formally signing anything. They also have a habit of projecting the worst of what their own history has shown their people to do onto us, as if expecting us to start eating their eggs because they did that back in their medieval period to establish dominance. They’re very curious about our history and culture towards that end of figuring out what the worst things we’ve ever done to ourselves is. We are trying really hard to explain the era of the purge to them very carefully.

In the galactic north, finding an arcane star or moon isn’t too hard but finding an uninhabited one is the tricky part. As mentioned before the northern part of the galaxy was very well developed in terms of its space frontiers. The engurians in particular really love arcane stars and moons too, and they deliberately colonized them a lot. It’s actually a point of contention between them and the zhulkites that they have always refused to share any and will aggressively colonize into regions of space closer to the zhulkites and other alliances to get to these stars.

It’s not that the attempt to get to Reika didn’t go well more so that once we found her a whole other clusterfuck happened that made it a bit problematic. She was where Song Yi was, and that attracted Kanika, who brought Decaelys with her, and then Ankathi almost lost control of Kharla in the process. It didn’t help that Ankathi turns out to be the main reason that Reika isn’t in a hurry to come back, given that whole extortion binding thing they were up to awhile back.

Then Auni killed Song Yi, taking control of the Song Clan for herself in the isolation field of Decaelys so the only real witnesses to how that happened are a bunch of people that Song Clan really isn’t likely to trust very much. We only know about this because a mysterious message came through to Nah division which we think was actually from Reika. It’s possible she’s keeping tabs on Kanika because…well someone has to. That undead-but-alive-again-dragon-supremacist does have a habit of casually changing the fate of worlds while passing through on the way to the galactic gas station.

Also we found out what Rahlken is coming for, Jamalia. he took the entire colony off the planet and its just a pile of dirt now. Haziel’s comment was “what do you want me to do, bite it? This is a fleet job”. The nearby station and local defense accomplished next to nothing against that ship and he just stole the whole colony. While the more rural developments to help the displaced Alnae are still there, this is a logistical nightmare as you might expect. Is it just me or has Enohas been getting royally fucked up ever since it was discovered? It feels like they can’t go two years without something cataclysmic happening to them.

The Enohas Refinery is still fine, and was fired at when its defenses fired at Rahlken but he didn’t exactly stop to pick a fight with it or steal it too. Given these events, I suspect that in some way Yasrena is related to all of this. It was clearly an attack on the relocating Alnaeans.

Speaking of whom, Jaerda is currently in a mild state of shock while running around trying to solve the logistical problems of her people’s only link to us, the portal network, being ripped off the planet so suddenly and Diadem closing off its portals to everywhere else under Laura King’s administrative orders.

The space bugs are still hanging around Diadem but not all of them are on our plate. Despite their massive swarm, Diadem is also quite massive and they have a lot of room. To the point that I’m not unconvinced that they come by more often than we might think. According to Vasia they just seem to be looking for leaves and things to munch on and it might be some strange seasonal thing. She also asked if we want her to handle the quarantine situation at Cayetano, with the sort of smug expression that indicates she knows we don’t want her to but she knows we know she’s the galaxy’s greatest containment expert. Though I’m not sure how much would be left to contain by the time she’s through with everybody.

Every day I’m turreting. Deow dow dow chicka dow dow.

As for assisting Echo Prime with the other Exerlus, she told us to stay far away from any of those battlefields. Since the Cradle, and ourselves, are made out of “stuff that can be made into more exerlus” the odds are our contribution would amount to giving them more materials to work with. Whether that be the exiles or Zero North’s forces is anyone’s guess. At best we could go act as a mining operation in areas near the battle zones to scrap planets worth of resources and deliver them to Echo’s forces instead of the exiles to get ahead of them on materials and deprive them of any near the battle zones.

As for the destroyer, it is largely complete though final approvals depended on how much we want to heed the exerlus warning that it will accelerate our ‘aging’ for anyone who plugs into it. However, the design is definitely more capable than typical destroyers and is both more durable while packing more firepower and maneuverability then standard designs if we want to go ahead and enter it into production. Though it requires more crew than a typical ship of its class.

Adrienne and her team has been sent out to go meet with the Zhulkites and see whats going on with them over there.

We’ve sent our stealth cruiser out, via a network of portals and other shenanigans, to the northern side of the galaxy to look into that planet with the VSS Raptor in its shipyard. Initial investigations show that this is a post-fallen world. It has likely been destroyed thousands of years ago but the remains of civilization are still here and there in various states of decay. The space station however is operating and it orbits while maintaining a precise precision above a functioning facility on the surface of the planet below. We haven’t sent a team groundside yet to see whats going on down there due to that probably costing us some stealth but the technology of the station is clearly well beyond most of the galactic standard. Whoever owns this place, the tech is sort of halfway between ourselves – and most other galactic civilizations – and the exerlus. Not quite at the top but definitely notable how much more advanced they are.

We’ve refrained from scanning due to that latter bit of information and instead rely on long range visual investigation for fear of being detected if we were to do otherwise. Judging by the ruins of this world, whatever civilization once lived here it was on par with Sol for density. It was likely once what the exploration corps refer to as a ‘golden world’. It still is fairly nice in its climate and resources, but it does leave the question of how the civilization there fell and why it appears someone else moved in afterwards. We have no way to assess if its new inhabitants caused the downfall of that civilization or just parked on the ruins of it for their own purposes.

The VSS Raptor is not the only ship at that station that is clearly not native to the place. We have found Nelta ships, an exerlus cluster, and a chunk of some sort of bioship among other oddities.

Due to the technological level of that station we don’t think these are pirates. Pirates tend to be a bit scrappier and more cobbled together. This is the kind of station people like Nelta and the Federation would have built. Intentional in every step of its design. It is also a little too well secured for anything less than a military outpost. We’ve had no luck discerning why the VSS Raptor is here on the wrong side of the galaxy though. Though judging by our scouting run, the stealth cruiser is able to get much closer than anyone else. It might be our one shot at getting anyone on the ground to get a closer look. Though judging by the station’s displayed hostility levels, this would be a bit on the dangerous side.

As for Rampart and Kuhas, they’re cloning…that random alien guy who we have no idea who they are but apparently runs the whole station with themselves and a bunch of clones of themselves. I’m not sure if finding out they’re all clones of one alien is a major revelation or not, for all I know this is some long lost hero of a foreign planet, clones of some ingenious pirate mastermind who took over Kuhas and built it into what it is today, or just some homeless dude they paid two hundred bucks to spit on a sample swab. What we have figured out from further observation though is that these clones all return to the same guard stations throughout the station and are never seen out of uniform because they likely don’t have much of a life outside of being a guard. Fleshy cloned automatons of some sort. They just patrol, sleep in the barracks, then patrol some more. There is so far no evidence that anyone in particular comes by to check on them who might be of any higher authority and other than the one clone who doesn’t wear full patrol armor we can’t tell if anyone actually is in charge or not.

We’ve established another base at Jydoq to continue ongoing operations there though in the wake of the war on Thenica it appears Kar’Soluth has also become more aggressive with their operations on this world. Leading to more fights with Kaylen and Kennae as well. They’ve also begun the process of uniting some smaller sections of Jydoq and appear to be trying to form a new great house from them with a jydoq “matriarch” though the jydoq don’t have genders so not sure if that is really the right term or not. Essentially they’re working to replace Merlan.